Cold Blooded Murders (24 page)

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’.