I pull up this New Yorker article when I reach my hotel. I read again about the growth of private probation companies and what’s starting to be dubbed the Prisoner Reentry Industrial Complex. It’s a lucrative industry, with hundreds of thousands of people ticketed for minor offenses like failing to pay parking tickets, then sentenced to probation managed by private companies—who make millions. Major banks such as JPMorgan Chase, too, are profiting from the correctional system’s use of prepaid debit cards, or so-called release cards, containing the remaining funds left in a person’s prison commissary; unregulated, these cards charge exorbitant transaction and maintenance fees. Here in Singapore, reentry industries clearly abound, whether Helping Hand or the other acronym-titled organizations giving me PowerPoint presentations during my time here. All, as the CEO said, are indeed trying.
But it’s Gary’s strident voice that resonates in my head. Because he’s really asking the same thing I asked myself in Thailand, land of similarly draconian drug laws. What is good programming in the face of people who never really deserved to be locked up—who, if anything, need treatment and not punishment? What does it mean to create a superb reentry plan for those who ought never to have had to reenter in the first place? The schizophrenia at the heart of Singapore’s criminal justice policies suddenly strikes a painful chord. Punish these so-called misfits—but then, don’t. It’s as if the country’s drug laws manufacture offenders, not so they can have the pleasure of stoning them—this was the old, revenge-hungry way—but so they can have the self-righteous joy of rehabilitating them. It all adds up to one more way to enact Singaporean efficiency: Look how productively, how humanely we do reentry.
The problem is, this performance demands a sinner, and today I met four of them. Sinners who feel more like scapegoats.
———
I affix the yellow ribbon to my white collar. Some fifty people are doing the same, milling about in the prison’s antiseptic central lobby and gearing up for brunch.
Yes, brunch. Today is Dining Behind Bars, a Yellow Ribbon Project fund-raising event held several times a year, and the final activity on my official itinerary.
“Buses are outside!” comes the signal. We file in to be shuttled over to Cluster A. To the lustrous Changi Tearoom, actually, which has its own entrance, so we barely have to penetrate the land of barbed wire. A seven-prisoner band shod in crisp, slate-gray oxfords, their heads closely shaved, greets us with instrumental music in a room elegantly set up with red tablecloths and walls of prisoner-made art for auction. Life Was Slower Then is the title of one painting for sale; it’s a placid scene of humble fishing boats along the Singapore River, in the days before development took over. One of the powerhouses behind this development is at my table, the senior vice president of Marina Bay Sands.
On cue, the music swells. Three singers in lavish purple vests make their entrance, sashaying toward the stage with microphones in hand.
“Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree,” they sing, all smiles and snapping fingers. My tablemates hum along, bopping their heads.
One might imagine that by this point in my journey, I’d be immune to such bizarre, disquieting prison scenes. But you never get used to them. So when we’re directed to line up for a tour of Medium A, I’m relieved to enter the real thing.
Except the real prison tour proves only slightly less of a performance.
“Do not call us officers,” says our grinning guide in uniform, adjusting the yellow ribbon beside his name tag and explaining the new penal terminology. “We are Captains of Lives.”
The officer leads us into a model cell, unoccupied, where everything is labeled: toothbrush, uniform, “modesty wall” separating shower from sleeping area. And, of course, the straw mats for which Singaporean prisons are famous.
“But why not give them beds? Is it not cruel?” someone asks.
“This is punishment, still,” our guide answers. “Rehab, yes, but punishment. We cannot give beds to people we are punishing. They must sleep on mats.”
The yard is essentially a concrete cave with a volleyball net, devoid of natural light. I pester the officer with questions about scheduling, and he lets out that the first tenth of each prisoner’s sentence is known as the deterrent phase, twenty-three hours per day spent in the cell “to reflect on their action.” After that, prisoners can be eligible for programs.
But which programs? And for how many hours a day? So much time in the cell, even with cellmates, is beginning to strike me as solitary by another name. Jobs, counseling, he says, waving me off. I press him for details, but he utters something about 30 percent of prisoners having jobs, then steers us onward.
Just 30 percent? And the others languish in dank cells all day?
“Good morning, sir-ma’am! Thank you, sir-ma’am!”
The salutation strikes again, as we don masks and hairnets to enter the SCORE bakery. A prisoner wearing a microphone headpiece presents the place for our inspection. We are halal-certified, and we make European-style breads and pastries. Here is the assembly line, and here is the UV light capable of detecting any foreign object that may have slipped into the bread, and also any defects.
It’s intensely hot, and the delicious scent of treats in the oven tantalizes. How do these men bear it? Unlike us, they don’t finish their stint by enjoying the fruits of their labor: chocolate muffins, éclairs, French bread—the bread served on Singapore Airlines flights.
“Our bakery has many corporate clients. The prison is also home to the largest laundry in Southeast Asia,” the officer pronounces. “We serve about 90 percent of all hospitals. Forty million per year in revenue.” Incarcerated men are paid a stipend, he goes on, and the skills training they receive is invaluable.
It’s time to return to the tearoom and take our seats for the grand meal. Doors swing open theatrically; the music surges and the singers parade in, now sporting striped aprons and chef hats. A line of officers follows them, and more prisoners in blazers and bow ties. The first course is radish summer truffle with “beurre morne,” followed by leek soup, then a delectable fish soufflé. All overseen by local celebrity chef Ryan Hong, who makes an appearance after the meal to take a bow and heap praises on his incarcerated trainees.
My table is impressed, and they rave about it. The food is divine, the Yellow Ribbon Project does excellent work, the prisoners are getting job skills.
“And the companies can stop hiring foreign workers,” mutters a voice to my right. My ears perk up.
In 2013, I learn, Singapore had its first labor riot in fifty years. It revolved around the more than one million low-skilled foreign workers in Singapore. Never mind that they do the jobs locals don’t want to do, went the chorus. The foreigners are flooding our gates; they’re taking over.
I have a “no-duh” moment. This great government push to get former prisoners hired is quite simply about economics and politics, driven far more by practical aims than moral ones. In an economically booming country where an abundance of low-level jobs need filling, and where there’s a long history of xenophobia, the attitude is, better to fill them with our own, even if they’re “ex-cons.”
The result is a movement and, conveniently, a labor force. Prisoners have been the backbone of Singapore’s labor force since the country’s inception. Like Australia, this was a penal colony. Between 1825 and 1867, 15,000 “convicts” from India, Burma, and Ceylon were shipped here to become, essentially, the public works department, clearing jungle, filling in swamps, and building roads, seawalls, and most of the country’s historical buildings. They managed stray dogs and tended to gardens and cemeteries; despite vicious floggings, their labor conditions were touted as much better than India’s—prisoners were paid at two-thirds the rate of free labor—and after their sentences, they were smoothly integrated into the workforce to keep the colony running.
I might be sitting in Singapore’s brand-new prison, but it’s actually uncanny how little has changed here.
“
Peace has been sold to the gentleman at table two,” announces the superintendent, marking the end of today’s silent auction. All of the prisoner-made paintings have been purchased.
“Sweet Innocence will go to the woman at table one.” The prison band segues into a final rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.”
As we know, across the globe prisons have long been about manufacturing and managing labor forces. In America, historians argue, the beginning of the prison boom in the late 1970s coincided with a dramatic cut in jobs for low and unskilled workers. Prison was one method for dealing with a sudden surge of unemployed workers, by simply taking them off the market.
But should it matter why Singapore is promoting reentry and reintegration, as long as they’re doing it? Would that America had a PR campaign around mass incarceration with as much impact as the Yellow Ribbon Project’s. Would that we could boast of more top-level executives, like the VP at my table, who contribute to prison-related causes, let alone step foot inside a prison and commit to hiring formerly incarcerated people. And would that my students had a nationwide SCORE-like entity to find them jobs after release.
But still, Gary’s voice resonates in my head. They won’t hire us. Only for labor jobs. Kitchens, labor.
Resonating, too, is the voice of Jaden, whom I’d met earlier in the week at Tanah Merah, a high-security prison transformed in 2011 to a prison school. My tour of the place had revealed more of the Singaporean same: engineered progressiveness and kindly yet patronizing supervision. Murals featured starfish and lighthouses—“This symbolizes the prison school as promise for the future. You are the creator of your own reality,” the officer read from his script. Daily life involves assemblies, choir practice, harmonica lessons, and evening tutorials; teachers are recruited from the school system for two-year stints. I even visited a multimedia hub, where a robot crawled across a massive TV screen and a prisoner wearing a cordless mike delivered a polished, well-rehearsed, TED-style talk about the many offerings here, including production work and “News Behind Bars,” made by and for people in prison.
This was all heartening. Even if Tanah Merah has just 182 students, it’s a place to learn, aspire, plan futures, pursue dreams. But then came Jaden. He was paraded in for me to interview, sporting a red T-shirt and Converse sneakers and looking about twenty-five. He’s been home for two years now, and, letting off the same unease as the men in the halfway house, was prompted to deliver his spiel. I was in a gang from secondary school, he explained, wringing his hands. Got in trouble with the law for sniffing glue, cigarettes, trying meth. Crime.
“In America we simply call that ‘adolescence,’ ” I interposed. Here, though, it’s enough to land a teenager in prison, followed by the further trauma of reentry.
The superintendent reported that Jaden is studying building and construction and works in a gym, and we should be so proud of how far he’s come. I nodded.
But downstairs, as we all exited the complex, Jaden and I chatted more casually. He asked about my students and my English class.
“I really want to be a writer, you know,” he confessed.
“Really? So why don’t you go back to school?” I asked. “And try to get published?”
He all but burst into laughter. “The shorts won’t fit,” he said. He meant it literally. In Singapore, once you drop out of school you cannot go back and wear that uniform again; you must pay for private education, which most cannot afford. This makes Tanah Merah an important exception—the rare place where educational options, and the chance to pursue careers as opposed to jobs, are open to prisoners and former prisoners. No wonder the men at the halfway house could not wrap their heads around the notion of a “dream job.”
The injustice of it had struck me when I chatted with Jaden, and it strikes me again as I take my leave from Cluster A today. Shuttling former prisoners into labor stints, into bakeries and laundries and retail outlets, instead of affording them the full range of opportunities. It’s an injustice reminiscent of my own country, where prison university programs like mine are a rarity but mundane vocational training thrives. Where even public universities have the right to deny people admission on account of minor or juvenile offenses sealed by the courts years ago.
The message is clear. You’re good enough to work with your hands, but not with your mind. I will never forget the look on my incarcerated student Jose’s face when I told him he might consider getting a PhD. It was the same look Jaden had given me this week, a look that said everything about the message conveyed to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals for much of their lives. Dream jobs, higher education, chasing aspirations—that’s not for your kind of people.
“Prisoner reentry is like building an emergency room to solve cancer,” one of my activist inspirations, Glenn Martin of JustLeadership USA, has said. Once again I’ve laid eyes on a global Band-Aid. A supremely engineered one, from which there is plenty to learn, but a Band-Aid still. Onward.
8.
Justice? | Norway
Sorrow is inevitable, but not hell created by man.
—Nils Christie
Love is an unfinished relationship. In its state of being unfinished, love is boundless. We do not know where it will lead us, we do not know where it will stop; in these ways it is without boundaries. It ceases, is finished, when it is tried out and when its boundaries are clarified and determined—finally drawn.
—Thomas Mathiesen
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
The 7:00 a.m. wake-up call jolts me from sleep. Climbing out of bed, I tear open the curtains. Darkness. Is it morning, or still last night? Norway in November doesn’t know the difference. The minimal light here makes me feel as if I’ve landed in a world where it’s perpetually dusk. Cloud-heavy skies resemble a mammoth down blanket, muting all colors, every now and again peeling back a corner to tease us with a hint of luster. Life has been reduced to three tones: icy blue, slate gray, dried-blood red.
Bundling up, I make my way to the tram. As usual, no one checks my ticket; public transport here operates on a trust system. Outside, streetlights are low. Oslo may be the fastest-growing capital in Europe, but as a city it doesn’t gaudily announce its presence. The place is soothingly quiet, humble in its beauty. Waiting for my train, I browse the station’s bookstore, chockablock with crime fiction, which is hugely popular here. It’s ironic for a country whose melancholy, noirlike landscape is tailor-made for crime, yet whose reality contains so little of it. Norway is one of the safest places in the world.
That’s why I’m here. If ever there were a utopia, Norway has a reputation for being it. It’s an oil-rich, welfare society—top-quality education, health and child care are provided almost entirely by the state—with a long-standing culture of equality, safety, and communitarianism. Instead of serfdoms or a feudal society, Norway’s economic life was for centuries based on small village units and local democratic self-government; nobility was abolished over two hundred years ago and there’s never been a distinct upper class. Norway’s climate and geography limited immigration, and cohesion was fortified by the country’s uniform population. When agitprop filmmaker Michael Moore wanted, in his documentary Sicko, to depict a world that’s the polar opposite of ours—the antithesis of America’s capitalist, every-man-for-himself ethos, a Disneyland of social services and profound parity—he filmed in Norway.
He filmed, especially, in Bastoy Prison, my destination today. Nothing repres
ents the Norwegian way like its prison system, which has adopted a “Principle of Normality” according to which punishment is the restriction of liberty itself, and which mandates that no one shall serve their sentence under stricter circumstances than is required by the security of the community. Criminologist John Pratt sums up the Scandinavian approach using the term “penal exceptionalism,” referring to these countries’ low rates of imprisonment and humane prison conditions. Prisons here are small, most housing fewer than fifty people and some just a handful. They’re spread all over the country, which keeps prisoners close to their families and communities, and are designed to resemble life on the outside as much as possible. An incarcerated person’s community continues to handle his health care, education, and other social services while he’s incarcerated; the Norwegian import model, as it is known, thus connects people in prison to the same welfare organizations as other citizens and creates what’s called a seamless sentence—meaning a person belongs to the same municipality before and after prison. Sentences here are short, averaging eight months, as compared to America’s three years. Almost no one serves all his time, and after one-third of it is complete, a person in prison can apply for home leave and spend up to half his sentence off the premises.
The most highly touted aspect of the humane Norwegian prison system is the fact that it seems to work. Crime rates are very low and the recidivism rate is a mere 20 percent. Where else could I conclude my journey? I know what to expect; I’m one of the many believers ogling this system. Whether it lives up to the hype is the real question. Can Norway at last take me to that elusive thing I’ve been searching for in full, flourishing form: justice?
Incarceration Nations Page 25
