The release of the review into the management of the prisons service, or more accurately, the Department of Corrections, on Friday has confirmed what most people have known for some time.

The service and its leadership are a mess.

The review goes further than might have been expected in calling for the removal of the top three officials in the service, but it must be assumed that the panel did its homework and does not see how anything but a complete change of senior management will suffice.

To be sure, there is an element of the tail wagging the dog in this.

Ever since last year?s prison officers? strike, the Prison Officers Association has had more influence over the running of the prison than the Commissioner and his deputies.

This is unsatisfactory in a disciplined service in which the chief executive officer must be able to make decisions and see them carried out.

Under Commissioner John Prescod, this is no longer the case.

The reasons for this are many, although given his previous track record in Jamaica, Mr. Prescod?s appointment was always going to be risky, to say the least.

But Mr. Prescod inherited a service that was in disarray and cannot be held entirely responsible for its problems.

The broader problem lies with Bermuda?s schizophrenic approach to incarceration. On the one hand, the Government and many members of the community want to see rehabilitation of inmates occur and the scandalous level of recidivism lowered.

On the other hand, some members of the Government and many members of the public want to see people who commit particularly notorious crimes punished, and punished for a long time.

Mr. Prescod was appointed with the mandate of reducing recidivism and it would seem that he has tried to accomplish that, in part by introducing ?kinder and gentler? treatment of inmates.

In doing so, it is probably no coincidence that he is now more popular with inmates than he is with his officers.

But that means that he failed to win over the officers, or in management parlance, ?get buy-in? to carry out his mandate.

That should have been his first task, and it means that he has failed.

For the sake of the prisons and the community, Public Affairs Minister Randy Horton should accept the review panel?s findings and let him go, along with Marvin Trott and Randall Woolridge. It?s time to wipe the slate clean and start again.

But the Government needs to decide precisely what it wants to do about incarceration and rehabilitation.

If it is really serious about rehabilitation, it needs to provide the Department of Corrections with the necessary expertise to teach inmates how to stop abusing drugs and how to moderate their behaviour. That means hiring many more social workers and drugs counsellors than it has on staff at present and giving better training to the officers themselves.

At the same time, it needs to ensure that the prisons are genuinely secure. It is an open secret that drugs are easily smuggled into the prisons and that some officers are involved with this.

The Prison Officers Association needs to adopt a zero tolerance policy on drugs among its members and must support the administration in drumming out those officers whose behaviour is damaging the reputations of all of its members.

That would be a start to having the management of the prisons and its officers working together.