CHRIS ATKINS: When I was in prison, the most dangerous men I met had one aim. That's why I know mass early release will put the public at risk

Labour’s early release scheme, which will see 5,500 prisoners let out to free up space in overcrowded jails – 1,700 of them today – is worse than chaotic.

It’s like using your credit card to pay off your overdraft.

The lack of capacity in Britain’s prisons is a serious problem. But to do it in a panic, without proper planning or support for those being bundled out of the gates, is a recipe for more crime. The long-term result will be misery for ­innocent people and additional pressure on the justice system.

As so often with the prison service, this indiscriminate approach helps no one. Some of the prisoners will be serving sentences that were already too long, while ­others should definitely be inside for a lot longer for the safety of the public. This failure to differentiate will have serious implications.

When I was in Wandsworth prison, serving five years for tax fraud, some men banged up on my wing were deemed so violent, so high-risk, that they were never allowed out of their cells. There was a significant danger that, if they mingled with the other ­prisoners in the exercise yard, someone would get stabbed.

But, in several cases, they were not in jail for violent offences. Usually, their crimes were drug-­related. They were low down the food chain in the ecosystem of drug dealers and prison had schooled them in violence.

They had one aim: to get out of prison, purely to commit more crime. People like that will certainly be among those leaving jail this week, because they are all too common in the system, and ­nothing that I have seen is being done to filter them out of the early ­release scheme.

I used to hear men discuss the crimes they were planning, because they used my cell as their recreation room. There weren’t many places on the wing with a table and chairs but, because I was an officially designated ­‘listener’ or counsellor, my cell was comparatively spacious, with places to sit.

The idea was that anyone with problems on their mind could come to me and talk things over. The assumption was that, because I had a middle-class accent, I’d be a source of wise advice. But the reality was that some of London’s biggest dealers would drop in to have a cup of tea with each other, while they worked out the details of their next shipment.

That’s how prisons work. Well-intentioned but naive schemes are exploited by hardened criminals with a strong incentive to manipulate the system.

To make matters even worse, there appears to be no effort at risk-assessment before these ­scattergun releases begin.

Leaked internal briefing documents show that some of the checks will be done after prisoners have been discharged.

That’s madness.

It’s as if the entire programme has been designed to maximise the chances of recidivism. Many ex-lags won’t even have a place to stay when they’re pushed out the door. That will inevitably fuel immediate low-level offending, as the men steal from shops, burgle houses and perhaps mug vulnerable victims to get cash to survive.

Under the parole system, prisoners can be freed after serving half their sentence – so a one-year term will be reduced by 50 per cent, with six months off as an incentive for good behaviour.

Early release works by cutting another 10 per cent off the sentence, so people serve just 40 per cent. But as I emphasise in my book Time After Time, that final 10 per cent of the sentence is, in fact, the most important.

That’s when all the resettlement planning normally takes place. It’s when accommodation is organised, when prisoners are applying for benefits and – one would hope – looking for employment. And it’s when they need to reconnect with their families, because all the studies show that reoffending is more common among people who don’t have the support of friends and relatives.

Everyone agrees, whatever their politics, that our prisons are in crisis, with more than 88,500 men and women currently inside a crumbling estate designed to cope with a fraction of that number.

Punishment has its place – but prisoners also need to finish their sentences believing that they have the tools to turn their lives around. If they don’t, they will go out and commit more crime, because they can’t imagine any other choice.

And more crime, thanks to this demented early release policy, is what we are about to see.

• Time After Time: Repeat Offenders – The Inside Stories, by Chris Atkins, is published by Atlantic Books.