Minority gangs in Singapore prisons: Prisonisation revisited
| Author | Lavanya Balachandran,Narayanan Ganapathy |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865819876674 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Minority gangs in
Singapore prisons:
Prisonisation
revisited
Narayanan Ganapathy
Department of Sociology, National University of
Singapore, Singapore
Lavanya Balachandran
Asia Research Institute and Centre for Family Population Research,
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
This article attempts to better contextualise the theoretical and empirical connections
between pre-prison orientation of prisoners and their subsequent adaption and subjective
experiences of imprisonment using the case study of Omega, a racial minority gang in
the Singapore prisons. While the article traces the gang’s emergence to its marginality
in both the mainstream and illegitimate societies, the persistence of Omega beyond
prisons is also shown to lie in its capacity to be remodelled for the street where the gang
operates on an equal footing with the historically entrenched Chinese Secret Societies in the
illicit economy. This research is not only able to adequately explain the form and hierarchy of
penal subcultures, and the differentiated strategies offered by the various racial, class and
gender groups to ‘surviving’ prisons, but also shows how in-prison adaptations affect the
construction of post-prison identities and behaviours. The intent is to provide a nuanced
sociological examination of the prison institution by capturing the iterative and interactive
effects between the ‘outside’ (i.e. street) and the ‘inside’ (i.e. prison), thus extending the
analysis beyond the deprivation-importation impasse by introducing an element of ‘exporta-
tion’ that help contextualise the racialised experiences of minority prisoners in the post-
colonial state.
Corresponding author:
Narayanan Ganapathy, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, 11 Arts Link, #03-06 AS1,
Singapore 117573, Singapore.
Email: socng@nus.edu.sg
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2020, Vol. 53(1) 44–64
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0004865819876674
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
Keywords
Masculinity, minority gangs, prisonisation, prison subcultures, Singapore
Date received: 21 May 2019; accepted: 26 August 2019
Introduction
The persistence of gangs in the context of the prison has been a well-observed and
documented phenomenon across national jurisdictions that have had great significance
for academics and policymakers. Gang subcultures within the prison have often been
understood through an appreciation of ‘prisonisation’ – the ‘process by which a new
inmate takes on the norms, customs, values, and culture in general of the penitentiary
and learns to adapt to the prison environment’ (Clemmer, 1958, p. 298). Historically, the
contention has largely been whether the behaviour displayed by inmates is attributable
to the prison institution itself, i.e. it is indigenous (deprivation model), or due to prison-
ers’ pre-prison characteristics that have been introduced into prisons (importation
model) (Goffman, 1961; Irwin & Cressey, 1962; Sykes, 1958) though the focus has
largely been on prisons in western jurisdictions, failing to examine the relevance and
transferability of prisonisation theories to societies with different socio-political and
cultural milieus. In Singapore, tough laws and the strict enforcement of penal codes
that determinedly draw on corporal and capital punishment have arguably positioned
the country as one of the safest with one of the lowest crime rates in the world
(Ganapathy, 2005). Among developed societies in Asia, Singapore has a considerably
high prison population rate with 199 per 100,000 as of 2018. About 70% of Singapore’s
prison population in 2015 were incarcerated for drug-related offences, a relatively high
rate by international comparison. In Denmark, the rate of imprisonment for drug-
related offences was 22.1%; in Portugal, it was 20.6%. The Singapore government’s
‘zero-tolerance’ approach to drug abuse and the ‘war against drugs’ waged since the
1990s have largely been responsible for the surge in incarceration rate. As of December
2016, the total convicted penal population was 9502: 8623 were male and 879 were
female. Of the total penal population, 6666 were convicted for drug offences.
Recidivism rates in Singapore have fluctuated significantly, from 44.4% in 1998 to
60%–70% in the 1990s, dropping to between 20% and 30% in recent years, though
the recently released five-year recidivism rate indicated that about 44% of offenders for
the cohort released in 2011 and 2012 had been re-incarcerated (Ng, 2019). The
Singapore Prison Service and its related aftercare institutions adopt a ‘racialised rein-
tegration’ framework (Ganapathy & Lian, 2016) where each ethno-racial community is
expected, with support from the state, to meeting the resettlement challenges of the
returning offenders; this might then explain the racialised nature of the social organi-
sation of the inmate system in the Singapore prisons.
This article offers a sociological appreciation of the characteristics of Singapore
prisons, their arrangements of power, social relations, intricacies of their cultures as
well as the prisoners’ pains and their adaptations and resistance they generate in
a society broadly understood as ‘authoritarian, patriarchal and paternalistic’
Ganapathy and Balachandran 45
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