EARL Fearon takes over today as head of the Jamaican prison system, hoping to slash by two-thirds the number of inmates who return to jail after their first conviction.

Fearon, who replaces Lieutenant Colonel John Prescod, expects to meet his target over a five-year period, cutting the re-offending rate from just over 30 per cent at present. But he stressed that achieving the goal will demand that the government provides the island's correctional services with the necessary resources.

"Our re-offending rate presently is 31 per cent. We're hoping to bring this down to 10 per cent in the next five years. This is our big project. If we get the resources, we can do it," Fearon said.

Fearon spoke to the Observer exclusively last night at a church service organised by the prison chaplaincy to bid farewell to Prescod, who had controversially held the job as head of the correctional system for the past eight years.

Prescod, who, during his tenure, survived several attempts at his ouster by the University and Allied Workers Union (UAWU), announced late last year that he was stepping down after the two turbulent years of his last contract.

In January 2000, prison warders, represented by the UAWU, went on a so-called sick out to protest against Prescod's re-appointment -- an action that led to the suspension of 800 of them for alleged breach of the essential services law that prevents strikes by certain categories of workers.

Their cases are still being heard by the Public Services Commission.

Three years earlier, Prescod had also run into trouble when he proposed the distribution of condoms to prisoners to help combat HIV/AIDS in the island's prisons.

That led to a riot at the St Catherine District Prison, which spread to other institutions. Sixteen prisoners died in those disturbances and another 40 were injured.

Prescod was facing flak again in 1999 after the escape of 22 high-risk prisoners from the maximum General Penitentiary in downtown Kingston in broad daylight, under the noses of their jailers.

The commissioner of correctional services was rebuked for his hands-off management style in a report of the jail break by High Court judge, Karl Harrison. Prescod's management failure was again in the spotlight a year later from another inquirer who probed the beating and injuring of more than 300 rebellious inmates at the St Catherine facility.

But despite these criticisms Prescod continued to win praise, locally and internationally, for his prison rehabilitation programmes.

Last night, Fearon spoke of the challenges facing the prison services and the environment which facilitated Jamaica's high level of anti-social behaviour and those who often ended up in the island's prisons.

"The country has too many single mothers," said Fearon, who in recent weeks has been acting for Prescod. "A matriarchal society creates imbalance in individuals' personal development. Where you have this imbalance, people don't function properly," he said.

He suggested that Jamaica needed to aggressively put in place programmes to strengthen the family and stressed the need for the prison to continue with its programme for the rehabilitation of offenders.

"We would want to have all criminals in the correctional umbrella," he told the Observer. "This will contribute in a meaningful way to rehabilitating these persons, making them more law-abiding and leading to a more just, peaceful and safe society."

The new commissioner rejected recent comments by Dr Raymoth Notice -- who worked as a prison doctor for seven years -- that 90 per cent of the prisoners to whom he spoke had said they would commit the same offences again because they had improved their criminal techniques in prison and would not be so easily caught again.

Fearon said he had not observed this from his interactions with prisoners. He also denied allegations by Dr Notice that many prisoners left jail carrying large quantities of drugs which they immediately tried to smuggle abroad.

He accepted there was a drug problem in prisons, but not on the scale suggested by Notice and argued that it was not a problem confined to Jamaica.

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