A team of delegates from the Caribbean left Bermuda yesterday with a wealth of ideas on how they can implement a system based on the Island's Alternatives To Incarceration (ATI) programme.

Commissioner of Labour and Social Affairs for the islands of St. Maarten and Curacao, Michael Ferrier, said they would be leaving to return home today impressed with the progress made in Bermuda in just two years.

He said his homeland introduced a similar system 20 years ago, but it had received little funding and so had been greatly abused by offenders.

Mr. Ferrier, who is the equivalent of a Labour and Home Affairs Minister in Bermuda, said he had been given renewed faith and hope in the system.

"The conference has gone very well and there have been a lot of ideas that have been passed along to us," he said.

"We have so much to go back with, but the other thing that we have got out of this is the connections and networking that Bermuda has achieved. That is a great thing.

"We will have to reinvent the wheel now when we go home - a lot of it has already been done here."

Mr. Ferrier said he had been encouraged to attend the two-day training conference on ATI by Dr. Lloyd Richardson, who works at a drug rehabilitation centre in St. Maarten.

The Commissioner said: "He convinced us in government that our approach should be different and there should be alternatives.

"We have had ATI for 20 years, but it did not come from government, it came from judges. They are using conditional sentencing. But we don't have the money and the monitoring systems in place.

"We are strapped for cash. This is why we have come here, to see how the private and public cooperation is working and to see how we try to implement some of that."

Mr. Ferrier and Mr. Richardson were accompanied on the trip by public prosecutor Gisele Veen-Jonkhout and State Secretary Marcel Gumbs.

The prosecutor said: "Our system works whereby offenders, for part of their sentence, will go to prison and the other part will be community service and rehabilitation.

"But there is no monitoring service so they leave the islands on one of the many KLM flights to Holland. They eventually come back and we catch up with them once they commit another offence. It's a money problem. We need money to make it happen."

They said part of their problem was also the fact that St. Maarten was divided into two separate territories, belonging partly to France and partly to the Netherlands.

Mr. Ferrier said this meant there was two separate Governments, two separate sets of agencies, and two separate mother countries to deal with.

He said there was no Customs department, so drug use and trafficking was a problem, particularly with cocaine and ecstasy.

He said the recidivism rate was similar to Bermuda's, at 80 percent, but heroin had not become a real issue in his homeland, where in Bermuda it was becoming a massive problem.

He added: "When someone commits a crime on one side, they can run to the other side. That, in itself, is an inherent problem. We try to work together but it is the process that hampers us."