By DIANE PHILLIPS

We’ve all heard the horror stories. The overcrowding, filthy conditions at His Majesty’s Fox Hill Prison. Conditions that turn our stomachs - five or six men in a crowded 8x10 space barely large enough for two, sharing overflowing, stink slop buckets, sleeping on anything that passes for a mattress, regardless of odour, the rats, rodents, roaches crawling all over sweaty bodies, and the incessant noise that inmates say would drive the free person around the bend. And those are only the glaring physical conditions. Disease and infections run rampant. The fear of beatings, rape, or worse, gangbanging, of being the target of the controlling forces in a hidden society of outlaw mafia-like class structure. Everyone knows who’s boss and who gives the orders.

It’s a frightening place and despite the best efforts of some of the guards, and the desire to change things from the top down, the reality is that being imprisoned in the hellhole known as Fox Hill Prison is a nightmare without end, one that can strangle the soul and sniff out whatever little bit of spirit remains. There is no way to protect the most vulnerable, The system is stacked against them. It’s built for the bullies, for the second, third or fourth time recidivist who knows how it works, how to get the smokes or dope or favours, even the guards’ backs turned at the right time. Fox Hill is not meant for the feint of heart and if only the toughest survive with any spirit or soul or hope intact, what does that say for the other thousands who go in as a first time offender and come out a ruined, drained lost soul, a man who entered the system for something as relatively basic as unarmed breaking and entering, and came out a broken human.

And while our prisons and those in the US and UK suffer from overcrowding and the consequences that follow, the Netherlands has closed 19 of its prisons in the last few years. Some have been transformed into schools or art galleries, others into markets and shops and creative spaces.

So what is the difference? Do the Dutch have a lower crime rate? Is there a ‘shortage’ of offenders to occupy the spaces originally built to hold and punish them?

Here is the difference: Instead of slapping a first time offender into a tiny cell in a massive hellhole from which the impact of the experience may never be erased, the Dutch – and others – employ a very thorough system of community service. The service is not ordered haphazardly – ten hours at The Salvation Army or Great Commission Ministries for stealing an apple. No, the community service is strict and strictly monitored, designed to provide a learning experience for those who are ordered to perform it and to benefit those townships or organisations that are the hosts of the hours. The underlying reasoning is that within each individual there is a talent or skill that can be coaxed out and that talent or skill can be put to good use within a community.

If this sounds too simplistic or idealistic, we know there are dozens of other reasons why crime is more rampant in places like Nassau than in the Netherlands. Breakdown of families, lack of ties to a real sense of community, a desire to feel part of something even if it is a gang. Exhausted mothers who mean well but there aren’t enough hours in the day, too many absent fathers who planted a sperm and departed the scene before the seedling matured. Hard-working dads who don’t know how to instill the same values in their offspring that their fathers instilled in them. Rough neighbourhoods where survival demands compliance or escape.

I’ve said it repeatedly – it’s rough out there and Fox Hill Prison is just a reflection of the rough edges of life in a city riddled with anger and hate and short on hope and faith and trust.

But is prison really the right answer? Aside from what it does to the incarcerated, look at the costs, roughly $40,000 to $50,000 per year per prisoner in most places. In the US, a 14-year-old boy who shot and killed classmates in Georgia earlier this month was charged as an adult. He will be in prison for the rest of his life with no chance of parole. If he meets the average life expectancy, his imprisonment will cost American taxpayers more than $2m. One youth.

Community service – maybe not for everyone and not in every case, but certainly worth considering as an alternative to a system in which two out of every three prisoners will be back behind bars. We know the Department of Corrections aims to change that chilling statistic and we applaud the intent but until we rid ourselves of the temptation to throw the guilty into a cell where we, the public, feel safe and never have to look at them, until we see there is another way, to use solid, serious community service as an alternative, we will continue to see the revolving doors of an overcrowded hellhole that changes name when a king or queen changes but never changes its true, true colours.

• Editor’s note: International figures show The Bahamas has an incarceration rate of 409 for every 100,000 people in the country - which works out at one in every 244 people in the nation. Of those, 96.9 percent are male.