JEFFREY ARCHER, freed from jail in July after serving half of a four-year jail sentence, wants to ban early release for all prisoners who cannot read and write.

The millionaire novelist, former prisoner FF8282, will outline his ideas when he addresses a sell-out conference of the Howard League for Penal Reform in Oxford.

“After two years of incarceration, I should like to offer one or two thoughts that I hope both the Government and the Opposition might consider,” he will say. “Introduce a 12-week reading and writing course for all illiterate prisoners, which would include a test at the end of the course that the prisoner would have to pass before they could be considered for any other job or, even more draconian, early release.”

The novelist, who is still on probation after serving two years and two days for perjury, insists that he is not going to become a prison reformer. He will today recount being sent from the Old Bailey to Belmarsh prison, where he spent his first three weeks in a jail that houses terrorists, murderers, rapists, drug barons and large numbers of seriously violent offenders.

“A month is a very long period of time when you are locked up in a cell with two other prisoners for 22 hours a day. First-time offenders should not begin their prison life among the professors of crime,” he will say Archer will support the decision by the Home Secretary to downgrade cannabis to class C from January, meaning that police would no longer arrest people found with small amounts of the drug.

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