As a former prison guard, I know how to make space: release drug offenders and minor gang members | Alex South

OOperation Early Dawn, the government's latest plan to combat prison overcrowding, sounds almost like a fresh start, a new beginning. But I can imagine that people in prison don't feel that way. Neither those in the cells nor the guards who unlock them.

With men's prisons in England With over 99% capacity, this emergency measure to combat overcrowding is urgent and necessary. It is difficult to see what other options the government has, because an overcrowded prison is dangerous.

In an overcrowded prison, lifers are placed with short-term prisoners, juvenile offenders with adults, pretrial detainees with convicted prisoners, and sex offenders with the general population. In an overcrowded prison, acutely mentally ill prisoners are housed in overcrowded, chaotic housing because there are no cells available in the infirmary. Violent prisoners who have seriously assaulted others are kept with the general population because there is no room in solitary confinement.

In an overcrowded prison, staff are under increasing pressure to “make it work” and find space where there is none. Cells that shouldn't be busy are called inhabitable. Cells with broken windows and broken beds and toilets that don't flush. Cells with bloodstains on the walls. Prisoners who shouldn't be sharing a cell are told they now can. Young people with older people, bullies with vulnerable people, the impressionable with the influential. An overcrowded prison is toxic and unsafe.

And although the prisons are full of prisoners, there are relatively few staff there. So there is very little to do for the endless influx of prisoners. There are rarely enough guards on duty to ensure a decent, sensible regime. The classrooms are empty, the workshops are closed.

I was a prison guard for nearly ten years. I worked in maximum security men's prisons and in local city jails. I saw how both long and short term sentences work in practice. If a minister asked me who to release and who to lock up, the answer would be obvious at first. I would release the petty thieves and drug addicts. These are the men who behave the same inside as they do outside. They steal from others, exchange food, clothing and toiletries for methadone, spice and crack.

The drug subculture in prison is rarely sophisticated. It is desperate, dirty and violent. Prisoners swallow pills in front of the nurse and then regurgitate them to exchange them for something else. Drug packets are hidden in the disemboweled entrails of dead pigeons and in dirty toilet bowls. Prison does not fight addiction, it exploits it.

I would also release low-level gang members. Their crimes are not without victims, but neither are they criminal masterminds. Hours behind closed doors do not teach them a new path; they reinforce the old one. If I had the choice, I would release these men. And yet I would do so with the full expectation of seeing them come back. Because as well as I know the reality of life behind bars, I also know the reality of their lives outside.

When we release the homeless back onto the streets, drug addicts back into their crack dens, and gang members back into the very same neighborhoods marked by the rivalries and feuds that put them there in the first place, the outcome is predictable.

I met many of these men. Lee, the man in his thirties who looked 60, with long, matted hair and deep-set eyes, whose cell I unlocked every day until his release date. I wished him luck, but then I saw him again the next morning, living in the rubbish sheds outside my flat. Or Matthias, funny and charismatic but gripped by addiction. I watched him pick up his plastic bag with the blue Prison Service logo and leave the old Victorian prison where he had been held for six months. The next time I saw his face was in the local paper: dead of an overdose at 29.

And Craig, a teenager serving two years for assault. As his release date approached, his behaviour worsened and he told me he was afraid to go home. He was released into the area where he was known as a gang member, where too many people knew him for the wrong reasons. To say he was different now wouldn't be enough for them. I often wondered what had happened to him if he had made it out. But I didn't have to ponder long. I saw him less than a year later when he arrived at HMP Belmarsh, on remand for murder.

So, yes, we can release short-term prisoners convicted of minor offenses, and of course that will free up space. As a special measure, and a short-term one at that, Operation Early Dawn will work. But there is nothing special or temporary about this situation. A prison that is little more than a human camp does not solve society's problems, it only exacerbates them.

Operation Early Dawn is a right and appropriate measure, as long as we are aware that the problems in prisons extend beyond the prison walls. These problems are not limited to cells; they can also germinate in our schools, our communities and even in our families.

It is really not just the prisons that need a fresh start.