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 having possibly other priorities, has permitted these conditions to arise.” So long as they were held in those conditions the committee could not visualise any time in the future when they might be safely released. In those circumstances, they could be expected to become more anti-social, not less.
The committee considered important four principles: 1. No detainee should be regarded as irredeemable. 2. The aim of detention, although primarily protective of society should be finally to set free detained persons as loyal and law-abiding members of the community, capable of and wanting to earn an honest and productive livelihood and who, above all, will not consider that resort to violence provides an alternative means of livelihood. This implies total moral, and to a certain extent, political re-education. 3. The principal therapeutic measures by which these rehabilitative aims will be secured are discipline and hard work operating in a realistic situation approximating as nearly to normal ways of living as possible. This implies that any proposed scheme should offer possible incentives for progress and disincentives for those who do not respond. For success a carefully devised scheme of dilution will be necessary for those detainees who are reluctant to respond to discipline and work. 4. The scheme should be primarily educative, teaching detainees the normally acceptable standards of conduct. There must be a clear realisation on the part of the detainees of the mode of operation of the scheme, a clear concept of its implications for himself, his personal progress within the scheme, and a sure knowledge that he can by his own efforts obtain his release, and that having achieved his release he will find a secure place in normal society. Briefly the present attitude of hopelessness must be replaced by attitudes of hope based in a sure self-knowledge and an appreciation of the normally respected values of society.
In accordance with these principles, the committee proposed a ‘progressive rehabilitative scheme’ of four stages.
In the first stage, all detainees would go to Changi prison to be detained under the most rigorous conditions. Accommodation and diet should be spartan and simple. Here they would be sorted out and classified according to physique, intelligence, aptitude for work, responsiveness to discipline, strength of affiliation to secret societies. Detainees would have to volunteer for the scheme, but they should be encouraged to volunteer if necessary by ‘reducing the amenities at present enjoyed at Changi Prison’. Added the committee: “It is certainly essential to indicate to detainees who are reluctant to participate in their rehabilitation that their sojourn in Changi Prison might be prolonged.”
In the second stage, detainees would be sent to Pulau Senang where they ‘will learn as a community to be independent and self-supporting in the same way as normal communities are learning in the process that all members of a community are mutually dependent, and most important of all they will learn that they themselves are members of a wider community with correspondingly wider responsibilities and wider loyalties than they now possess. We have no illusions that this is a difficult lesson to teach. It is for this reason that we recommend that at first no facilities apart from the barest protection from the elements and adequate food supplies and clothing be provided. We consider it essential that all detainees so transferred should be personally responsible for the construction of their more permanent shelter and progressively responsible for the provision of their food, and any other amenities they may enjoy. As a corollary we recommend that they should be positively encouraged to secure for themselves as a community as many of the more pleasant amenities of life as they are able by their own efforts’.
The committee did not think, however, that the scheme would be successful in winning these men from their past and present allegiances, and their own assessment of society, merely by encouraging them to secure their material needs. That was but the first step. All men besides their physical needs had their intellectual and spiritual needs ‘however dimly they themselves may perceive this’. There should, therefore, also be an educational programme, which should include socio-political re-education. ‘Considerable attention’ should also be paid to recreational facilities which in themselves were educational.
The committee recommended the necessity to develop a ‘house system encouraging healthy competition in games’ (a proposal which some experienced police officers with knowledge of the deadly games rival secret societies were inclined to play-with knives and daggers, chairs, sticks, bars of iron etc-viewed with some misgiving). The committee urged that the men be mixed as completely as possible regardless of their secret society affiliations. In the Reformative Training Centre, systematic mixing had been practised, the committee noted, and members of rival gangs had learned to live together amicably.
As for the spiritual education of detainees, the committee was rather diffident about making recommendations, but they did suggest that detainees should be encouraged to re-establish any religious associations they may have had. But detainees should, the committee insisted, be free not to be approached by religionists. “We believe that an approach to moral attitudes of living can only be secured if the men cease to regard themselves as different, and completely divorced from society.” They recommended that groups of entertainers should visit the settlement, and radio should be available to the detainees. In this way, the committee hoped that it would be possible for the men to develop to some extent a proper interest in the outside world. Books, magazines and newspapers should, therefore, be available to them.
In the third stage, detainees would be moved back to Singapore to live in open security camps, in which they would be employed, at equitable rates of pay, on constructive projects designed to emphasise the contribution that could be made in the community. Friends and relatives could visit them and in this way, detainees could become progressively accustomed to normal society. The committee recognised that their stay on Pulau Senang would have accustomed them to a decidedly artificial way of living: they would have had no contact with normal society, particularly feminine society.
In the fourth stage, detainees would be released subject to supervision by the police or an after-care officer. The committee recommended that the only necessary conditions for release should be that the detainee was considered to have reformed to the extent that he was unlikely to return to gangsterism, and that permanent and regular employment was available for him.
The report of the Ad Hoc Committee was endorsed by the Commissioners. Jek, one of the members of the Ad Hoc Committee, later successfully fought a parliamentary election and became a Minister in Lee Kuan Yew’s cabinet. The other former detainee, S. Woodhull, was arrested again, this time by the Internal Security Council (consisting of representatives of the Malaysian, the British and the Singapore Governments) and detained. When released, he continued his legal studies in England and later practised law in Malaysia.
No time was lost by the Commissioners in approving this scheme and forwarding it to the government. It was acted upon without delay. By May 1960, long before the Commissioners had completed their overall inquiry into the prison system, the Pulau Senang Scheme was in operation. Hundreds of gangsters were working on the island, creating something of their own, and, in this way, through toil and sweat, earning the right, the Commissioners hoped, to take their place in the community of useful citizens. This was the experiment that failed.