Lord Archer is set to become a campaigner against the ills of the British penal system, a leading prison reformer has predicted.

Frances Crook, the chief executive of the Howard League, told ePolitix.com that the convicted millionaire will use his new found freedom to highlight the problems faced inside Britain's jails.

Lord Archer, who faces removal from the upper house following his conviction for perjury, is set to champion the cause of penal reform at a conference organised by the group later this month.

Crook hopes the former Tory deputy chairman will harness his infamous capacity for publicity to raise awareness of the drugs crisis inside many jails.

"I hope that because of his high profile that when he talks about drugs in prison, about the lack of work in prison and how futile much of the prison experience is for many people that it will get to a wider audience and the public will sit up and listen," she told this website.

"He is a way of getting a wider public debate about the serious issues we want to raise."

Crook also warned that the current regime - under which many drug addicts find themselves incarcerated - is failing everyone involved.

"I spoke with a coroner recently who was getting increasingly alarmed by the number of young people who were dying of drug overdoses within days of release. It was because their tolerance levels had gone down while they were in prison," she said.

"There's a huge lesson here that you should never send people to prison to get them off drugs or to educate them.

"Education is for schools and colleges and drug rehab is done by the health specialists. That is not the role for prisons.

"Prison should only be available for people who have committed serious or violent offences and who are a danger."

She also called for a new sense of leadership from government in promoting alternatives to prison.

"The high quality supervision, probation, community service was a great success story. Everybody liked it; it was cheap, easy to manage, the local communities benefited enormously and [for] people who were put through it changed their lives," said Crook.

"I'd like to see ministers talking about how we could develop that and the new stages in it and how we can involve victims and local communities more. Let's see some leadership from ministers on this.

"I can't remember the time that David Blunkett has done something like that."

The Howard League chief also warned government of the risks to prisoners' health inside "shabby and crumbling" Victorian jails.

"They are inherently unsafe and unhealthy. There's rats, cockroaches and asbestos. Take your pick," she says. "I was amazed that over the summer there wasn't a serious outbreak of a really nasty disease of some kind.

"I was expecting cholera or typhoid or something. It was just a miracle that it didn't happen."