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.
Criticism
Pulau Senang was not without its critics. In the Assembly in June 1963 (a month before the revolt on the island), the former Chief Minister, David Marshall (15 years later to become Singapore’s first Ambassador in Paris), complained that the government was ‘using persons who have not been convicted by any courts, as slave labour’. They were paid very little. He said they should be paid trade union rates and their families should be supported by the government. Marshall said he had visited the island and he came away with a very strong impression of an aura of fear in all those detainees, an aura of helplessness and hopelessness, “because they are so utterly at the mercy of every minor official on that island. Their release or their continued detention is at the whim of officials and is no longer subject to law. They are beyond the pale of the law.” He thought it a very unhealthy atmosphere, and went on to say that he found it difficult to understand “whether, in fact, bringing these people in close propinquity over a long period, subject to not merely superior discipline of the officers from the prisons but the discipline of their own groups, does not build an esprit de corps which could endanger our peace, if in fact they are, as I have no doubts some of them are, drawn from secret society gangs.”
The Home Minister, Ong Pang Boon, reminded Marshall that the previous government had no scheme for rehabilitating secret society gangsters: they just locked them up three to a cell. When the People’s Action Party came to power, this state of affairs was considered undesirable, and Pulau Senang was being tried as an experiment. Only time could tell whether it would be a success. The Minister claimed that the results to date were encouraging.