Productivity — The Key to Singapore's Correctional Rehabilitation

Singapore's approach to both corrections and its drug problems is positive and direct. For that reason its policies are either lauded as sensible or criticised as repressive according to the commentators’ own position on the current drug and correctional controversy. Like most other countries, Singapore is not yet able to show that any one policy rather than another has been conspicuously successful: and even if it did claim success there would doubtless be scope for varying interpretations of this according to the criteria used. If one begins however with the modest assumptions that the people responsible for policy in Singapore are neither unlettered nor uncultured, that they are widely travelled and alive to the developments on corrections and drug problems in other countries of the world — and that they are genuinely concerned about the best interests of their country, then it is possible to identify objectives and tease out the principles for some future evaluation.

There are two arms to Singapore's action to deal with drugs and crime: and the policy is gradually to bring these together in a pincer movement to improve rehabilitation. One arm is the country's drive to develop, socially and economically. There is a keen appreciation of Singapore's need to be competitive in exports and to serve as an international market. With two million people crowded on about 600 square kilometres which offer little except human resources, secondary industry, tourism [and] commerce loom large as means of survival and improvement in the quality of life. Singapore is sensitive to the fact that it must produce and market on competitive terms to earn its foreign currency. It has therefore sought to mobilise the relatively unused human resources in the prisons and in the rehabilitation centres to provide selected competitive exports. The second arm of correctional and drug policy is the personal rehabilitation of the inmates of institutions with a corresponding reduction in the rates of recidivism. The attempt to join these two arms into a total thrust to benefit both the community and the individual is well illustrated by the creation of SCORE — the Singapore Corporation of Rehabilitative Enterprises. This statutory body is chaired by an industrialist, Mr Baey Lian Peck, who is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and who practically gives his services to the government.