ending a "lock 'em up'' mentality and putting more emphasis on treatment and rehabilitation.

A study of prison management now underway is likely to be expanded to include an examination of prisoner treatment, Health & Social Services Minister the Hon. Quinton Edness said yesterday.

And five prison committees preparing for the move to the new prison are already looking at the treatment and rehabilitation programmes the larger facility will allow.

Mr. Edness said the new emphasis is important, but will be politically impossible without public support.

While stressing that Government has made no final policy decision, Mr. Edness said he believes a change is on the way. "There is a necessity for the community -- the entire society -- to take a different view as to how we treat both young and adult offenders,'' he said.

"There is no question that the attitude historically in Bermuda has been to lock them up and in some instances forget about them.'' This system has failed, Mr. Edness said. "In fact, locking people up as a philosophy has spawned more hardened criminals than anything else, and there's no question that it has contributed substantially to the increase in violence that we are experiencing.

"I'm not saying that we want to be soft. If someone has committed a major crime they have to be punished. But there must be a different kind of philosophy, to try to correct the behaviour of the offender.

"If not, all they do is pollute the other offenders who come in for minor things, and before you know it we are spawning hardened criminals.'' Mr. Edness agreed the public's enthusiasm for rehabilitation has probably diminished after recent security incidents at the prison -- including one prisoner caught having sex with a prostitute at Addiction Services, and another charged with murdering a tourist while on a work release programme.

"One of the main functions of the Prisons Department is obviously to protect society,'' Mr. Edness agreed. At the same time, he said, most prisoners enter prison with a date they must be released, and society would be wise to prepare them for their eventual freedom.

Mr. Edness said it was difficult to offer much more than a custodial sentence at over-crowded Casemates. But the new prison under construction will allow the new philosophy -- perhaps reflected in a change of name from the Department of Prisons to the Department of Correction -- to be implemented.

Some of the obvious new programmes would seek to develop educational and social skills, and treat drug, alcohol and social problems. At the same time, he said, the prisons would develop better methods of determining what programmes are suitable for which offenders.

Mr. Edness said more consideration should be given alternate sentences as recommended in Dr. David Archibald's recent Drug Strategy report.

"Some people may not be sentenced to prison at all. They might be sentenced to community work. And right now we haven't used the electronic monitoring system. And we also need to look at parole programmes.'' A broader examination of society is also needed, he said, to learn why a relatively high proportion of young black males end up in prison.

"Government is very anxious to know about that,'' he said. "It's a very serious problem. We have a bi-racial community, we strive for equality in our community, but when it comes to incarceration, our prisons are 98 percent black.''