The Experiment
Devan Nair, a founder-member of the People’s Action Party, was in jail in 1959 when the PAP were voted into office. One of the conditions Lee Kuan Yew laid down before accepting the invitation of the Head of State to form a government was that Devan Nair and other pro-communist elements must be released. Nair by then was prepared to renounce his communist sympathies and to accept Lee’s democratic socialism. Lee’s conditions were accepted. Nair and the others were set free. At once, Devan Nair persuaded the Prime Minister to set up a Prison Inquiry Commission, “for I had not liked what I had seen of many of the demeaning conditions of imprisonment imposed by the British authorities-not on political detainees (on the whole my fellow detainees and I were treated well), but on convicted prisoners. For example, on the approach of a British prison officer, every convict had to kneel on the floor, with his head down. That aroused my ire, and it still does when I think of it.”
The Commission was appointed in November 1959 and Devan Nair was named chairman. Two of the Commissioners were academicians from the University of Malaya in Singapore: Professor T.H. Elliott and Dr Jean Robertson. The others were Jek Yuen Thong, Osman bin Abdul Gani, Chean Kim Seang, Tay Kay Hai, Sandrasegaram Woodhall and Francis Thomas.
The Commission submitted their report on 1 December 1960. “In terms of the modest aims which are being translated into practice in the new Asian states, and other parts of the world, our prison system will have to be almost wholly re-oriented if it is to make an effective contribution to the solution of the problem of crime and criminals in Singapore.” The Commissioners recommended that the reorganisation of the State’s prison institutions should proceed on the basis of the general principles and considerations set out in their report. The most obvious and fundamental of these considerations ‘is that the true object of the prison system is to achieve the rehabilitation of offenders so that they can return to the community as law-abiding and socially useful persons’.
The Government accepted most of the recommendations. Some were modified and some were not accepted. Prisoners were in three classifications: unconvicted prisoners (remand and civil prisoners, Criminal Law detainees, political detainees); convicted prisoners, and special categories (prisoners with less than six months, persons sentenced to death, persons detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, vagrants, opium addicts).
Criminal Law detainees were gangsters: they were detained, without trial, under the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Ordinance 1955. A Government White Paper referred to their ‘violent and unruly character’. Determined to wipe out the gangster problem, the government realised that this would mean placing a strain on the accommodation in the maximum-security prisons, ‘and, as a result, may necessitate continued overcrowding in the cells’. It was this overcrowding in the cells which the Commissioners had held was inhuman treatment on the part of the British. Faced with the problem themselves, the new anti-colonial government was forced to continue to overcrowd the cells. At the same time, the government agreed with the Commission that the prison system must evolve towards providing a comprehensive and effective rehabilitation service. As a positive gesture in this direction the Government accepted the Commission’s recommendation that an open prison be established on an island 15 miles south of the main Singapore island, an island called Pulau Senang. There, the idea was, gangsters could work their way back to society through toil and sweat.
Appointed by the Head of State, Sir William Goode, on 11 November 1959, the Commissioners were asked by the government for an urgent solution to the serious problems arising in the prisons from the presence of some 400 persons detained under the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Ordinance, introduced by the British in 1955. They were violent, resentful, quarrelsome men: they lived 18 hours a day in their crowded cells in unhygienic conditions due to lack of adequate water supplies. The Commissioners discovered that ‘these men lived without hope or dignity’. They condemned in strongest possible terms the existing conditions. “No effort has been made to rehabilitate these men.” The Commissioners were determined that something should be done. To find an urgent solution, the Commissioners in January 1960, set up an Ad Hoc Committee consisting of Professor T.H. Elliott, Sandra Woodhull and Jek Yuen Thong. Within weeks they had produced the Pulau Senang Scheme.
The Commissioners commented briefly upon the scheme in their report because by then it had become an operative part of the prisons system. “We wish to indicate that, devised to deal with a special problem, it incorporates concepts different in some respects from those embodied in our Report, while observing those general principles that we consider fundamentally essential in any effective rehabilitative scheme.
The Pulau Senang Scheme assumes that most of the detainees are likely to be rationally responsive to a system of incentives and that with the increasing benefits they discover they enjoy through an increasing acceptance on their part of the normal values of society, they will also come to realise that there are other and more profitable ways of living in society than engaging in unacceptable anti-social activities of their former mode of living.”
The Commissioners continued: “In the prisons we have proposed a scheme which attaches great importance to the social acceptance of the individual and which recognises that there may be people who would be quite unresponsive to incentive inducements either because they are inadequate in a competitive world, or because of their resentment against society, or for other more complex reasons, and have consequently developed their own and personally satisfying scale of values. Clearly for such people a different approach is necessary. This we have attempted to provide by discounting incentives and competitive activities and by offering privileges which are not necessarily earned and which would not necessarily be taken away for misbehaviour. We would wish the difference between these two separate systems to be maintained in the hope that valid comparisons might be made at a later date when the results of the complementary approaches to the general problem of anti-social behaviour could be comprehensively assessed.
We would certainly regard the Pulau Senang Scheme as being in some degree experimental, but we do not consider that this is in any way to be criticised, when so little is known concerning the causes of anti-social behaviour and probably little more regarding their effective treatment.”
Making their investigations which eventually led to the establishment of the Pulau Senang Settlement, the Ad Hoc Committee found there were 426 police detainees held in Changi Prison, There were two groups: those who volunteered for work and those who did not. Only 57 volunteered. They constituted less of a problem than the others: they occupied separate cells and observed normal prison routine and followed normal working hours. The remainder, because of the high prison population, were accommodated three to a cell. They had two exercise yards. The men were classified according to their secret society affiliations. All the members of the 24 gang occupied one yard and members of the 08 gang the other.
For security reasons it was not possible to let all the detainees out at the same time during the day. Half were let out into the exercise yard in the morning and half in the afternoon. Consequently all detainees were held in cells for 18 hours each day under unhygienic conditions largely owing to inadequate water supplies. Release to the yards for the remaining six hours of the day offered very little improvement because of lack of constructive occupation and diversions. “The men we saw in the yards either squatting or aimlessly wandering around, appeared to be without hope or dignity and those that we had an opportunity of speaking to appeared if not intensely introspective and morbidly bound up with their own condition, to be filled with resentment at their detention, the conditions of which they could see were deteriorating daily as numbers increased.”
For 18 hours a day in the cells, the men depended upon what they could mentally offer each other, and ‘from their previous experiences and activities prior to detention the nature of this mutual counsel can easily be imagined. We observed that their sole reading matter was usually the more dubious type of illustrated comic literature.’ In the yards the men walked about or talked in groups.
Not surprisingly, the Ad Hoc Committee came to the conclusion that ‘this arrangement of segregation on a gang basis, with such opportunities for intercourse daily strengthens rather than diminishes the former gang affiliates and loyalties and provides an opportunity for the leaders to exercise their domination and organise junior members’. The committee expressed their surprise that proper facilities for recreation were not provided.
The committee condemned ‘in the strongest possible terms’ the existing conditions under which Criminal Law Detainees were held. Absolutely no efforts were made to rehabilitate them. Nevertheless, the committee did not blame the prison administration. “With inadequate funds and having a major problem already in dealing with the inflated convicted prison population, these officers have attempted to deal with the problem in accordance with the means at their disposal. That it has produced conditions that would be condemned in any society calling itself civilised, is a reflection not so much upon them as upon the society that by failure to recognise the problem, and by
