Boot camps, mandatory work and 23-hour lock down should be considered for inmates now viewing prison more as a rite of passage than a place of punishment, says union leader Craig Clarke.

Some convicts chose to do time rather than pay a fine because prison is a soft option rather than a scary ordeal, said Mr. Clarke.

The Prison Officers Association president told : ?Our system is actually breeding criminals because they understand now coming to our institution is not a problem.

?They will see good friends up there.

?The mentality when they get out is I have been there, I have done that, I am big now, I am the man now. That?s the mentality they take out on to the streets.?

Recently Government MP Wayne Perinchief called for violent offenders to be sent abroad for a period to give them a short, sharp shock but Mr. Clarke said it was unlikely other countries would take Bermuda?s prisoners.

?Maybe we should look at boot camps. We have to find changes. Most of the crimes are being committed by young offenders now, they are getting younger and younger.

?We want to save our young people, sometimes you have to take extra measures and think outside the box.?

He said strong discipline should go hand in hand with improvement programmes to change behaviour as inmates are now spoiled.

?We are spending $60,000 dollars on each inmate and the taxpayer of this country is getting nothing in return. It?s a vast amount of money.?

But still recidivism is running at 70 percent.

?If the corrections department was a business, we would be bankrupt. If an inmate doesn?t want to work or take a class why should we just let him sit up in a room all day?

?Maybe we should keep them locked down 23 hours a day. People will say that is cruel. It is not ? we are here to change behaviour. We cannot give them everything.

?We are not helping. They get used to people doing everything for them.? He said around one quarter of inmates are uncooperative. ?That?s a very high number.?

He said one Jamaican who had been jailed in his home country and New York had told him Bermuda had the best prison in the world. Recent figures put Bermuda?s incarceration rate as the second highest in the world.

There is little inmate on inmate violence and there isn?t the sexual abuse typical of other jails as everyone has their own cell at Westgate, said Mr. Clarke.

One option is tagging prisoners and sending them out to do unpaid community service, said Mr. Clarke. ?They could be out their repaying their debt to society. It could be ideal.?

He said the prison service is generally warehousing people rather than reforming them.

?Bermuda doesn?t have a corrections department ? we have a prison.

?We need more life skill programmes. Certain people in there don?t even know how to fill out a job application.

?They become institutionalised. We need more trades so when they get out of prison they have something to do so they don?t return and become a burden on the system.?

He said the woodwork programme ran well but more effort must be put into the vital programmes treating drugs and sex offenders.

Both Mr. Clarke and Prison Commissioner Hubert Dean told that programmes should be mandatory.

Mr. Dean said even though a court could stipulate a prisoner do a certain programme upon conviction that inmate could opt out and only risk losing parole.

He said Westgate had a good programme for teaching inmates life skills but he said there would be human rights considerations if a boot camp was considered.

Mr. Clarke also expressed his fears over security.

?Perimeters are still being breached,? he said. ?Those facilities are not as secure as they should be.?

He called on Government to stop dragging its feet on installing night-vision cameras and lighting near the maximum security unit to catch people throwing drugs over for prisoners.

?Put a sign there saying anyone speaking to anyone on the property will be prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law.

?Simple things can be done but they are talking about it having to be designed by Works and Engineering.

?It doesn?t take rocket science to fix the basic things. Nobody is being prosecuted because they don?t have the cameras in place.?

Prison officers also fear new get tough policies planned by Government including jailing drug traffickers for life if they are caught three times will make matters worse with prison already at 90 percent capacity.

Government has also promised to hike sentences for many categories of prisoners.

Mr. Clarke said until the Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) programme has more bite and the parole board gets real the situation will get worse.

He said the parole board has been fussing over whether departing foreign prisoners have jobs to go to when they leave the Island. ?That?s not Bermuda?s business,? he said.

And he said Government promises that the Repatriation of Prisoners Act, which has only sent back one prisoner since it was passed in 2002, would soon help clear space was unlikely given most of the 64 foreign inmates are from Jamaica, which is not a signatory.

Prisons boss Hubert Dean has said a prefab might be built to house the overflow of prisoners but Mr. Clarke said: ?We cannot man that until we get more staff. They can put it there but there is no way the Association will allow people to work unless they give us the tools.?

He said the service is short of nine officers on the old staff compliment of 254, while the prisons inquiry had agreed that higher levels of 263 were needed.

Staff are being dragged off onto specialised units such as the canine squad further depleting the rosters, said Mr. Clarke.

Gang violence, currently the scourge of the Island, has not yet spilled over into Westgate, said Mr. Clarke but he fears it is a matter of time.

Stressing he didn?t want to glorify the concept of gangs, Mr. Clarke said it was noticeable that people were hanging out in prison with their local cronies.

?In the future will it spill over into the department of corrections ? I am sure. Probably not as drastic as in the US,? he said.

?If people are outnumbered they won?t want to be put in a unit with somebody they have something with.?

?We try as best we can to keep these people apart and use intelligence to make sure violence doesn?t break out within our walls because that is the last thing we need.?

He called for strategic planning of where the prison service is going in the next five to ten years.

?We lack a vision, we need to get it back,? he said. understands Government will soon announce the appointment of a consultant hired from the English prison service.