The Making of Captains of Lives

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

• CONTENTS

• NOTES ON ABBREVIATIONS

• INSEAD

When I joined the Civil Service in 1972, I was fresh from a National Service stint and studying in the first year of university in UK on a Public Service Commission (PSC) Scholarship. Little did I realise then that one day, my career in the Civil Service would take me to the Prison Service and I would be instrumental in reforming the prison system.

While my preliminary agenda was clear, I had to decide how to deliver on this agenda. I had led a number of change processes in the Police Force prior to my Prison Service posting. My experience had taught me that if I drove my agenda as my own personal agenda, others would seek to undermine it. While I was in CID I had the opportunity of attending a 5-day Learning Organization Course conducted by Daniel Kim and Dianne Corry of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They were the disciples of Peter Senge, the author of the book “The Fifth Discipline”. The practical guide I learned from them on how to tap the collective wisdom of the organisation would become my method of choice to effect and manage the change. Fresh from leading the change effort in CID, I knew that getting others to buy in on my agenda would also not be sufficient. The best way was to help the leadership team think through our situation together and hope that they would come to the same action agenda as I did. The members of the team would then drive the agenda collectively to achieve wider buy-in. So upon taking over, my first order of business was to assemble that leadership team and create platforms for the team to think through our situation together. I also knew then that taking this approach, I would have to be prepared to let others help shape the agenda.

The system that was developed would eventually be known as the Housing Unit Management System or HUMANS for short. The acronym was chosen to signify the shift of emphasis in inmate management to become more inmatecentric. This acronym was only dropped some four years later when the system became the only system of inmate management within the Prison Service and the key plank of inmate management. The decision to stop using the term was also a result of comments from higher quarters that the term suggested that the Prison Service had gone “soft”.

There was a tremendous amount of goodwill, commitment and enthusiasm at the visioning retreat. I cannot quite remember how the maritime flavour seeped into the vision. I believed it had something to do with the starfish story contained in a training video first shown at the Work Plan Seminar. This was the synopsis of the video: “An old man was walking on a beach dotted with countless starfish one morning. He noticed a boy picking up starfish one by one and gently throwing them back into the sea. When asked why, the boy explained that the stranded starfish would die if left to lie in the morning sun. ‘But there are millions of starfish on this beach,’ said the old man. ‘How can you make a difference?’ The boy picked up another starfish and threw it back to the sea. ‘It makes a difference to this one.’ The starfish story would exert a lasting influence in the Prison Service and re-told many times after the Work Plan Seminar. When I left the Prison Service in 2007, among the parting gifts I received was a starfish made of clay in a wooden frame from an inmate. It was accompanied by a tribute which still moves me today.

The rejection of our proposed vision statement by the Ministry of Home Affairs came in the form of an email. To most officers in the agencies and departments, the Ministry was a somewhat amorphous entity. However, as I had worked in the Ministry for two years from October 1990 to September 1992, I could usually make a good guess as to who was behind a certain decision from the Ministry. In this case, the rejection did not surprise me but its tone did. Just to introduce the cast at the Ministry, at the top was the Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Wong Kan Seng. This is the man who introduced the legislation criminalising repeated drug offenders. Reputed to be tough as nails, he was known for coming down hard on crime and being tenacious in the pursuit of policies to safeguard the security of Singapore. He was assisted by Professor Ho Peng Kee, the Minister of State (de facto deputy minister). Professor Ho is a true humanitarian, a good foil to the Minister. The politicians were supported by civil servants who were both the politicians’ think-tank and executives. The Head of the civil servants in the Ministry was Mr Peter Chan, the Permanent Secretary. He was a man with great intellect and given to introspection. All correspondence from the Ministry was issued on behalf of the Permanent Secretary but most key decisions were made or at least concurred with by the Minister.

At the threshold of the millennium, another dawn of sorts was breaking in the Prison Service. The new Prison School was to open its doors to inmate students on 3 January 2000.

By the time the Prison School opened its doors, the rehabilitation framework had been largely developed. Being the central plank of my original agenda, I could not wait for the visioning process to be completed before developing ideas about how to carry out rehabilitation. In fact, some work had been done by my predecessor Mr Poh Geok Ek. Although there was no R&P (Research and Planning branch) then, Mr Poh had assigned a few staff officers to conduct a thorough search of the literature on the topic of rehabilitation of offenders prior to proposing the setting up of a rehabilitation division to the Ministry. Thus, the organisation had been up to speed on the theoretical aspects of such a venture. However, since there was a lack of practical experience, the Ministry had refused to channel resources into something which they regarded as uncertain and unproven in the Asian context. I knew that I had to start experimenting on our own steam without asking for additional resources, at least initially. Frankly, at that point in time, I was unconvinced myself and I needed to have a first-hand look at a correctional system that had successfully carried out rehabilitation. So in May 1999, I led a team to the United Kingdom and Canada to study their respective rehabilitation systems.

Once the vision and mission statements were finalised, we wasted no time to brainstorm on how to plug the gaps between the vision and the current reality. This was done again in early 2000 by way of a task force of the key staff members whose views had proven to be useful in the visioning exercise. The work of the task force would pave the way for the 2000 Work Plan Seminar. At this point, we started to run into some methodological difficulties. The literature on learning organisation typified (but not limited to) by Peter Senge’s book “The Fifth Discipline”, which we had been using to guide us in our visioning hitherto, was not specific enough to shed light on how we should proceed from where we were. The problem of steering the organisation in a new direction was enormous and the literature did not give us sufficient guidance on how to break down the problem. One day, while doing some mental callisthenic to try and find a solution, it dawned upon me that we could map the six vision markers against the functional areas identified in the mission statement. Each box of the two-dimensional matrix would be a component of the larger problem but it would become more manageable to grasp intellectually. I suggested this newly invented method to the task force. The task force was then broken down into groups to consider each box of the matrix in turn. A sub-set of the results is given in Annex A as an illustration.

It is apparent from this list of 15 anchor projects that a great many initiatives had already started before we got to this point. Many of these initiatives were internal to the Prison Service and aimed at making the service more efficient, more focused and more aligned to the vision. I will just deal with one such initiative here, namely the ethics structure. In Chapters 2 and 3, where I touched on the origin of HUMANS, I mentioned the fact that there had been cases of prison officers being compromised by inmates. When we started to experiment with HUMANS, we were well aware that this problem might re-surface if we did not have a way to deal with the ethical dilemmas that a prison officer would inevitably face when he became familiar with his charges. How should he deal with the hard luck stories that inmates would come up with from time to time to seek his help beyond what was allowed? To an officer new to the service, this would be emotionally draining. We need to give him all the support possible to make the judgement call and if, indeed, some interventions beyond the rules were called for, we should re-examine the rules. What we must not do was to treat every hard luck story as an attempt to compromise our officer and reject it out of hand. The result of this line of thought resulted in the ethics structure.

By the end of 1999, I could look back with some satisfaction at the strides that we had made to embrace the idea of rehabilitation. For one, we had our vision and mission statement but second, and more importantly, a lot had been accomplished on the ground: the Prison School had opened its doors; R&P (Research and Planning branch) and Programme Branch had been set up and the rehabilitation framework was in place; HUMANS was beginning to be accepted as the right model for inmate management; and the strategy for the next three years had been forged and it would be presented at the Work Plan Seminar in May. A few other things had also been accomplished. I managed to strengthen our intelligence capability by borrowing two Police intelligence officers from the Police for the Prison Intelligence Branch. I had also borrowed officers from the Civil Defence Force to strengthen our Operations Division and Logistics Branch. Everything appeared set for take-off.

One of the many threads of thinking that came out of the scenario planning retreat was the importance of creating the correct corporate image for the Prison Service. I always believe that advertising only works if one has a good product or a good idea to sell. Especially in this electronic age, what we are and what we do becomes public knowledge very quickly. If we try to paint ourselves as someone better than we are, we will soon be found out and be branded hypocrites and cheats instead of being associated with the desired corporate image. I also believe that advertising is not just for external audiences. More importantly, it is for the internal audience as well. It is a signal that we are prepared to back up what we are trying to achieve internally with a public message. Although a corporate image campaign was always at the back of my mind to help change the public perception about the Prison Service, I had to wait for the right moment to do so. I had to be confident that we had enough substance to go public about our new emphasis on helping inmates to become useful citizens. By substance, I did not just mean the systemic structures we had put in place to effect the change, but also the change in organisational culture to support such an approach.

The newly minted alliance between the Prison Service and SCORE did not come a moment too soon. With the success of the corporate image campaign focussing on building a new corporate identity for the Prison Service, it was now time to broaden the public relations campaign to garner public support for aftercare of ex-offenders. The need to do this was patently obvious. No matter how well the Prison Service did to rehabilitate offenders; the time would come when they would be released back to society. The real world challenge for them would be of a different order than the controlled world of prison. They needed the support and understanding of their family, friends, prospective employers and the community around them to give them another chance to make good. I decided to ask SCORE to spearhead this effort because SCORE played a key role in promoting the employment of exoffenders in the community. To broaden the support base, I believed it was a good idea to present this new campaign as a CARE Network initiative. CARE Network was after all about aftercare.

Many people are fascinated by the notion of rehabilitation. At the core of the matter is the question: how can people be changed? The belief that people cannot change is encapsulated by that immortal saying: “a leopard cannot change its spots!” To change people in normal everyday life is indeed difficult, if not impossible. Life has too many temptations and distractions and most people are not able to pursue a course of change single-mindedly. Prison, however, provides a unique environment in which change is not only possible, but an everyday occurrence. At one fell stroke, a prisoner is stripped of his or her past and given a fresh opportunity to restart. You cannot have a more egalitarian society than the one in prison, where education, social standing, wealth, affiliations and profession do not matter one bit. Everyone is treated as equals and nobody gets better treatment because of who they were before they come to prison.

In early 2007, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Benny Lim, spoke to me over lunch. He offered me a secondment to a government-linked private sector company — Aetos Security Management Pte Ltd (“Aetos”). If I accepted the offer, I would leave the Prison Service six months before my retirement to give way to Ng Joo Hee. Just before this conversation, my relationship with the Ministry had become quite testy. It seemed to me that this was an indication that the Ministry had enough of me and I must confess that at the point in time, the feeling was mutual. I accepted the offer. In return, I was given the opportunity to attend the Advance Management Programme in INSEAD, Fontainebleau (near Paris) to prepare me for my foray into the private sector. I left the Prison Service in November 2007 to take up the post of CEO and Executive Director in Aetos; however, I only retired from the Civil Service in May 2008. Just before my departure, my deputy and close associate Jason Wong accepted an offer from the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) to be seconded there for three years. He subsequently requested for his service to be transferred permanently from the Prison Service to MCYS. He would later accept an offer to transfer his service to MCYS, never to return to the Prison Service.

The leadership model was such an important issue that I think it warrants a separate chapter. When I became the head of Singapore Prison Service, I thought that it was important to determine what effective leaders were like in the Prison Service so that their skills could be documented and transferred to those who came after them. The leadership model could also form the basis of the appraisal of the top talents in the Prison Service and identify their development needs. In the earlier years when I was busy trying to determine the broad approach to reform the prison system, I had no time to focus on this matter. By the time I came round to it, it was near the end of my tenure. The study I mentioned in the last chapter did produce something very worthwhile and not entirely expected. Unfortunately, I would soon leave the Prison Service and had no time left to see through its implementation.

It has been almost four years since I left my post as Director of Prisons. The Prison Service has gone through two leadership changes in the mean time. My successor, Ng Joo Hee was in the post for two years before he was appointed the Commissioner of Police. Soh Wai Wah succeeded him as Director of Prisons in January 2010. By all accounts, the business of rehabilitation goes on. Both my successors believed in rehabilitation and had made further refinements to the system I left behind. If it were otherwise, I would be the saddest man on earth. Events seemed to suggest that all the labour and risk taking that went into reforming the prison system had not been wasted. The political leadership in the Ministry had changed too. The new administration has been much more supportive of what the Prison Service is doing and I expect greater things to come from the new leadership team.

The following sections are included:

• ABOUT THE AUTHOR