I spent 20 years in prison… here is the chilling thing I noticed on my first day in a high security jail

A man who spent 20 years in prison has revealed the most horrifying thing he experienced behind bars.

Dwaine Patterson was given a life sentence for attempted murder at the age of 20 after shooting two people during a gang war in 2000.

He spent 22 years in prison, including seven years in solitary confinement, where he spent 23 hours every day without any human contact.

Dwaine, who grew up around Clapham Junction in south-west London, was also sent to a young offenders institute for five years after cutting off a rival gang member’s finger with a knife at the age of 13.

Speaking on the Anything Goes podcast with host James English, Dwaine revealed how dangerous it was to be in the prison canteen.

He said: ‘One of the first things I identified when I went onto the wing under high security. When someone came out of the kitchen with a pot in their hands, everyone moved sideways and everyone watched.

‘Someone tapped me and said, ‘You don’t know where that’s going.’

‘Nine times out of ten it’s just someone cooking their food, but sometimes it can be used as ghee.

“Remember this: in distribution areas where you can cook food where you had oil, butter or ghee, I think these are some of the worst incidents I have ever seen.

“If you let it bubble up so long that it turns black and someone pours it on someone, it’s terrible when you hear them scream.”

Dwaine also revealed how he once saw a man beaten ‘inhumanly’ by prison guards to the point where he wet himself.

He explained that the man’s mother had recently passed away and he wanted to call his family to make sure everything was okay.

However, his request was denied by prison staff and he began kicking his cell door in frustration.

According to Dwaine, this provoked the prison guards who beat him to the point of “inhumanity” and caused the man to wet himself.

Dwaine said he remembers the officers laughing and waving their fingers at the man before cutting off his clothes.

“I think this is one of the worst things I ever experienced while in solitary confinement, and I always remember this.

“It was a man and he’s not a friend of mine, he has racist tendencies, but his mother died and so all he wanted to do was call his family and have that conversation with his family.

“The officer said he kicked the door again, he got frustrated because he wanted to make a phone call, which he wasn’t allowed to do, so he kicked the door and [the guards] said come on guys let’s get dressed and they hit him so hard.

“It became almost inhuman and he wet himself.”

“They laughed about it and I also remember some of the female officers wiggling their little fingers because he wasn’t willing to come down.

“So they laughed at him and cut his clothes and so on.”

Dwaine previously spoke in the podcast about how he cut someone’s finger off with a knife at the age of 13.

He said, ‘Because you’re so young, because I was thirteen, you don’t understand the magnitude of what you’ve actually done.’

Explaining why he cut off the person’s finger, Dwaine said, “It comes down to the dynamics of the group and not liking the specific group.”

“I can’t necessarily say that that young person did anything directly against me, but it was just the whole person he was associated with that I didn’t like, so I was just making a statement.

‘It’s bad, it’s horrible and my heart goes out to the young person. He’s a grown man now and has a family.’

Dwaine was released from Feltham Young Offenders Institution at the age of 18, but was soon back behind bars just two years later.

Speaking about the night he shot two people, Dwaine said: “I got the call and I said these individuals were allegedly involved in illegal activity.

“My protocol was okay, we’re going to get what they have and they can’t say anything about it because they’re also involved in what we’re involved in

‘We also had a system that if you show it your gun, you use it. There’s no point in talking about something and waving it around if you’re not going to use it.

“So that’s basically what I did. I pulled out the gun and shot them both, and I thank God they survived.”

After the incident, Dwaine eventually turned himself in to the police while “other innocent people were implicated in the incident.”

Dwaine was subsequently given a discretionary life sentence for attempted murder at the South Western Magistrates’ Court in 2000.

Dwaine has previously spoken out on another podcast, BEAMLDN, where he described some of the harrowing things he saw while incarcerated.

He said he saw someone’s “throat being slit from behind” and saw someone throw hot oil on another man’s face.

He said: ‘I have seen horrible things. Like someone having their throat slit from behind or getting hot oil, that’s horrible.

“When you see the person’s face, everything melts away.”