As an ex-prison officer, I know how to make space: let out drug offenders and low-level gang members | Alex South

Operation Early Dawn, the government’s latest plan to tackle prison overcrowding , sounds almost like a new beginning, a fresh start. But I imagine that’s not how it feels for people inside prison. Not for the ones in the cells, nor the officers unlocking them.

With male prisons in England at more than 99% capacity , this emergency measure to tackle overcrowding is urgent and necessary. It’s hard to see what other options the government has. Because an overcrowded prison is a dangerous one.

An overcrowded prison is one where lifers are housed with short-termers, young offenders with adults, the remanded with the sentenced, and sex offenders with the general population. An overcrowded prison houses acutely mentally ill prisoners on busy, chaotic residential wings because there are no cells available in healthcare. Violent prisoners who have seriously assaulted others remain with the general population because there is no space in the segregation unit .

An overcrowded prison is one where the staff are under increasing pressure to “make it work”, to find space where there is none. Cells that should be out of order are designated habitable. Cells with smashed 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 while prisons may be full of prisoners, they are relatively empty of staff. So for the endless flow of inmates coming in, there is very little for them to do. There are rarely enough officers on shift to provide a decent, meaningful regime. Classrooms are empty, workshops are closed.

I was a prison officer for almost 10 years. I worked in high-security men’s prisons and local city jails. I have seen how both long-term and short-term sentences work in practice. If a government minister were to ask me who to let out and who to keep in, the answer feels obvious at first. I would release the petty thieves and drug addicts. These are the men who behave much the same inside as they do outside. Stealing from others, trading food and clothes and toiletries for methadone, spice, crack.

The drugs subculture inside prison is rarely sophisticated. It is desperate and dirty and violent. Prisoners swallow pills in front of the nurse and then regurgitate them to swap for something else. Packages of drugs are hidden in the gutted innards of dead pigeons and in filthy toilet bowls. Prison does not address addiction, it exploits it.

I would release low-level gang members too. Their crimes are not victimless but nor are they criminal masterminds. Hours behind locked doors does not show them a new way, it reinforces the old one. If the decision were mine, these are the men I would release. And yet I would do so with the full expectation of seeing them come back again. Because, as much as I know the reality of life behind bars, I also know the reality of their lives outside.

If we release homeless people back on to the streets, drug addicts back to crack dens and gang members back to the very same areas shaped by the rivalries and feuds that brought them inside in the first place, the outcome is predictable.

Related: Britain’s jails are in terrible crisis, but prison can work. I know, I’ve seen it | Zoe Williams

I have met many of these men. Lee, the man in his 30s who looked about 60, with long matted hair and sunken eyes, whose cell I unlocked every day until his release date. I wished him good luck but then I saw him the following morning, living in the bin sheds outside my flat. Or Matthias, funny and charismatic but gripped by addiction. I watched as he picked up his plastic bag stamped with the blue Prison Service logo and walked away from the old Victorian jail that had held him for six months. The next time I saw his face was in the local newspaper; dead at 29 from an overdose.

And Craig, a teenager serving two years for actual bodily harm. As his release date approached, his behaviour worsened, and he told me that he was afraid of going home. He was being released into the area where he was known as a gang member, where too many people knew him for all the wrong reasons. Saying he was different now wouldn’t be good enough for them. I often wondered what had happened to him, if he had made it out. But I didn’t have to wonder for long. I saw him less than a year later when he arrived at HMP Belmarsh, remanded for murder.

So, yes, we can release short-term prisoners convicted of low-level offences, and of course it will free up space. As a special measure, and a short-term one, Operation Early Dawn will work. But there is nothing special or temporary about this situation. A prison that operates as little more than a human warehouse does not solve society’s problems, it merely amplifies them.

Operation Early Dawn is a right and appropriate measure, so long as we realise that the problems in prisons extend beyond the perimeter walls. These issues are not confined to cells; they can be found germinating in our schools, our communities, even our families.

It really isn’t just prisons that need a fresh start.

• Alex South is a former prison officer and the author of the memoir Behind These Doors

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