Making headlines is one such SIB launched on Riker’s Island, right near my home—the largest penal colony in the world. The city of New York, I read, has contracted with a nonprofit, nonpartisan social research organization to reduce the rate of recidivism by at least 10 percent over four years among annual cohorts of about three thousand young men exiting Riker’s. To do this, they will manage two nonprofit service providers; working capital for the intervention, $9.6 million over four years, is provided by Goldman Sachs as a loan. It’s an exciting prospect, this union of progressiveness and practicality.
At John Jay College, I meet with a woman launching the Reset Foundation, gearing up to establish Wandoo-like prison settings in California and New York for court-involved youth, based on the charter school model in public education. They’ll repurpose existing funding to build a campus instead of a prison, and are held accountable for improved outcomes like academic growth, lifetime earnings, and reduced recidivism.
It all hammers home the important point that not all capitalism is created equal. Private prisons are a very convenient, very salient villain—and indeed as it stands today, there’s a terrifying amount that’s villainous about them.
But there doesn’t necessarily have to be. Perhaps there’s such a thing as privatization with a conscience, implemented morally and progressively in the name of true corrections. Imagine it: agencies taking SIB-style approaches, barred from impact on policy and held to a high set of standards that involve recidivism and postrelease success rates, not beds filled and money saved at all costs. It’s in line with the surge, these days, of B Corporations, for-profit companies that pledge to achieve social goals as well as business ones. There are over a thousand of them in the United States today—like Warby Parker, a chic eyeglasses company that has partnered with a nonprofit donating free glasses to those in need around the world. New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki argued that the B Corporation is a winning model because it protects businesses from pressure from investors and, on account of being attached to a higher cause, lures strong employees and committed consumers. Calling it a return to the business eras of Henry Ford or Johnson and Johnson, he dubs the growth of B Corporations “a reminder that the idea that corporations should be only lean, mean, profit-maximizing machines isn’t dictated by the inherent nature of capitalism, let alone by human nature.”
In the end, it’s a muddle I’ll continue to wade into as I visit another country whose culture, then and now, is steeped in both prisons and profit: Singapore.
7.
Reentry | Singapore
The fetters fell off. I picked them up. I wanted to hold them in my hand, to look at them for the last time. I seemed already to be wondering that they could have been on my legs a minute before.
“Well, with God’s blessing, with God’s blessing!” said the convicts in coarse, abrupt voices, in which, however, there was a note of pleasure.
Yes, with God’s blessing! Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead … what a glorious moment!
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, House of the Dead
Something resembling an oblong blimp is perched on a rooftop. Or maybe it’s a supersized surfboard, sprawled across three gleaming skyscrapers. Trees sprout from it, grasping toward the heavens.
“What is that?” I blurt out, to no one in particular. I’m looking at Marina Bay Sands, the most expensive building in the world.
Having recently arrived in Singapore, I am taking in the city-state’s futuristic skyline. Aside from the surfboard-in-the-sky edifice, there’s a white building shaped like a grand lotus flower, a glass Rubik’s Cube–looking thing skating on water and branded by Louis Vuitton, and towering structures that resemble a cross between massive daisies and airport control towers—a passerby explains that these are Gardens by the Bay. Singapore looks a little like Disneyland.
Disneyland with a death penalty, that is. So one journalist notably dubbed it, alluding to the draconian criminal justice system for which the country is known. Free candies distributed at the airport are subtle reminders of this no-nonsense approach—chewing gum is illegal here. My landing card serves up a much less subtle prompt. “Warning: Death for drug traffickers under Singaporean law” is stamped in bold letters across the bottom.
“Singapore Is a Fine Country” reads the slogan on tourist trinkets peddled all over Chinatown, where I stroll the day after arriving. You can earn a hefty fine for many things in Singapore, from posting the wrong thing on Facebook to eating fetid durian fruit on the metro. You can be caned for thirty different crimes, including, most famously, graffiti; in 1994, when visiting American Michael Fay was caned for vandalism and theft, the brutal practice made international headlines. The daily paper reveals as much as any statistic. During my first few days here I read about teens accused of spray-painting expletives, discharging a fire extinguisher, trespassing, stealing, and damaging property. Their punishment? Fines, jail for up to three years, three to eight strokes of the cane. And a man convicted of robbery, drug consumption, and failing to show up for a drug test got ten years and twelve strokes of the cane.
This allegiance to punishment is part of why Singapore is the next-to-last stop on my prison journey. But the other reason I’m here goes back to a Singaporean ad I’d discovered on YouTube while in Thailand, when I was doing research on prisons, PR, and the princess. In it, a young, melancholy-looking man in shirt and tie goes about his daily business, a forlorn-sounding hum in the background. Here he is taking the crowded commute to a corporate job, perched meekly at the boardroom table, numbly pushing a grocery cart down the supermarket aisle. But all the while he’s lugging around a cumbersome ball and chain, hindering him at every turn. A single statement appears: “Help ex-convicts lead a normal life.” And then, “SCORE: Singapore Corporation of Rehabilitative Enterprises.” Who are they, I’d wondered? Their formidable bit of marketing haunted me, exactly as it was meant to.
SCORE, it turns out, is part of the Singaporean government’s effort to tackle that hitch in the prison solution to crime: the fact that such a “solution” is temporary. Most prisoners eventually leave prison. What does society do with them when they do?
This process, known as reentry, is a global criminal justice buzzword. It was invented in America and attained national standing in President George W. Bush’s 2008 Second Chance Act, which included support for prisoners coming home. Mayors and governors across the country opened up reentry offices and launched committees, like New York’s Council on Community Re-Entry and Reintegration, established by Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014. Foundations sponsored studies on the subject and universities opened research institutes dedicated to it; my own Prison-to-College Pipeline, the country’s first education program explicitly designed with reentry in mind, is housed at John Jay’s Prisoner Reentry Institute.
Reentry. It sounds so seamlessly simple, as if you’ve temporarily left home and are now just returning, ready to pick up where you left off. But the process is anything but simple. It’s a dramatic coming-back-to-life, a strenuous resurrection, a full-on crisis.
Imagine you spend five, ten, twenty-five years locked away in an alternate universe that plays by wholly different rules. You’re doing time; time, halted, is doing things to you, doing things without you. Then one day you’re set free. Where do you go? Where do you live? How do you adjust to the utterly other world you’re suddenly in—socially, technologically, and otherwise? How do you find a job? Find your way around? Surely the country that locked you up will help you readjust after you’ve paid your debt?
No. Odds are that you, like most people coming home from prison, aren’t eligible for welfare, food stamps, or public housing. Like 80 percent of those incarcerated in US prisons you’re without health insurance; if you were ever enrolled in Medicaid it was terminated while you were in prison and the government hasn’t reenrolled you. Employers don’t want to hire you; in a sample of four large urban labor markets, 40 percent openly admitted they wouldn’t hire someone wi
th a criminal record. If you do have a job, you earn about 40 percent less than your peers who have not been formerly incarcerated, and if you live in any but four states you have no say about this reality, or any other government policy that devastates your life, because you can’t vote; you’re one of 5.85 million Americans—7.2 percent of our citizens—impacted by “felon disenfranchisement” laws. Of this total, over two million are African Americans, one of many factors named by law professor Michelle Alexander in her best-selling 2012 book The New Jim Crow, which describes what segregation looks like in the twenty-first century: a new racial caste system born of the invisible punishment that is reentry. The “lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society,” she writes, is designed to “warehouse a population deemed disposable,” that is, blacks and Latinos, and to deepen social inequalities. Inequality produces crime, which means that ironically this “New Jim Crow” system ultimately diminishes safety; masses of people cycling in and out of the system are being denied the economic, social, and political resources that would help them stay out of prison. The result of all this is that America’s recidivism rate hovers at 60 percent.
Singapore’s recidivism rate, though, is only about 25 percent. Some nine thousand people here go home from prison every year, and the country has launched a host of ventures to handle this influx. I’m keen to get a look at these progressive movements in the land of penalties. As my journey draws to a close, I’m ready to turn to the subject of getting out of prison.
———
On the morning of my first meeting with prison authorities, though, I’m wondering about getting into prison. The question nagged me. How did I get here? Singapore is hardly known for transparency—the government all but runs the press, and the country is notoriously guarded about its justice system. The simple answer is that I met someone who knew someone, at a criminal justice conference last year. And being a professor at John Jay certainly helps open doors. But still, I wondered, why would they let an inquisitive outsider in?
My query is answered during an all-day orientation at the manicured SCORE offices.
Adorning the office wall, near the impressive library and the DIY health center, hangs a blown-up 2011 Straits Times article about grand revisions to the Singapore Prison Service, or SPS. “What a Difference a Decade Makes,” the headline reads. Prisons were once old military barracks but now they’re “purpose-built.” Prison officers, once barred from even talking to prisoners—“in case the latter manipulate or corrupt them”—now boast degrees in economics, law, science, and the arts, and they must talk to prisoners in order to “learn what they need.”
A vital word entered SPS’s vocabulary in 1996: rehabilitation. In one fell swoop Singapore decided to speak of prison as about more than just punishment; the SPS operations philosophy and corporate statement were revised accordingly. New prisons, terminology, and dizzying acronyms were born, like MAS (Mandatory Aftercare Scheme), CBS (Community Based Sentences)—the list goes on. This new approach yielded results. The country’s recidivism rate dropped from 40 percent in 2000 to 23.6 in 2010. I’m here because the government is eager to show off its born-again identity.
Learning this made me even more eager to see the system at work. Not only because it reflects such a dramatic shift in a short span of time, but because it’s justice by choice and not by economic necessity. Plenty of countries, the United States included, have their prison conditions dictated at least in part by dollar signs. They simply can’t afford better conditions or can’t competently manage finances to produce them. Singapore, though, with its lucrative job market, governmental efficiency, and vast prosperity—it’s one of the richest nations in the world, said to possess over $500 billion in sovereign wealth funds—can do as it chooses. For decades its choice was harsh punishment. What’s the choice now? The whole thing seems a remarkable test-tube scenario, cutting to the heart of ideologies about retribution, reform, and justice.
———
The next day my destination is Changi, a rambling complex neighboring the airport that houses all but one of Singapore’s fourteen prisons. It was a colonial prison built by the British administration of the Straits Settlements in 1936, and now it comfortably houses some 12,000 prisoners and 2,500 corrections officers. During World War II the Japanese military detained civilians there, and the former Seralang Barracks, where I’ll spend today, was a prisoner-of-war camp for up to fifty thousand British and Australian soldiers. With the exception of these barracks and one lone crumbling wall, the complex was recently demolished and the prison rebuilt.
Military barracks, then, have been reborn as Seralang Park Community Supervision Center, a work-release facility for prisoners nearing the end of their sentences and for former prisoners checking in with postrelease supervisors. I make my way through the barbed wire into a vista of rusty green zinc.
More than half the country’s prisoners pass through here at some point, most after release. They report to an area that feels like a public-school auditorium. Hundreds of formerly incarcerated people are checking into electronic self-registration kiosks, taking their seats in the waiting area and meeting with their supervisors to discuss life on the outside—their jobs as cleaners or telemarketers or cooks. Singapore has a 99 percent success rate in finding jobs for the formerly incarcerated, primarily in the food and beverage, retail, and tourism industries. Thanks to job coaches and consistent collaboration with human resources departments, they boast that 59 percent of those “emplaced,” as they call it, retain their jobs for at least six months after release. This is radically different from the United States, where roughly half of the formerly incarcerated remain jobless up to a year after their release. Surveys show that employers are not shy about overtly discriminating against people with criminal records, baldly expressing negative views about them in ways they might hesitate to do with regard to other factors like gender, age, or race.
Dorms, where up to 120 men reside for their last few months in prison and a few serve their entire sentence, are gray and spare. The only decor is metal lockers and child-size bunk beds fitted with cartoon-covered sheets, a step up from the straw mats they sleep on in prison. “Optimism,” reads a sign on the drab wall. Those in prison here do not wear uniforms and are placed in jobs on the outside; they’re also granted home leaves and volunteer in community projects.
“There is no trouble; prisoners behave,” an officer tells me. “They treasure this place. Don’t want to mess up.” Those who do are put on display, via a wall of mug shots. I scan the posters. “Failed to notify employer when sick,” reads one. “Lied to officer in order to gain curfew extension.” “Attempted to cheat the company by falsifying membership sign-ups.”
The officer is a former engineer. “I used to build houses, but now I build people,” he declares on our way out.
Work-release, which I’d also glimpsed at Wandoo in Australia, is something of a no-brainer. A study conducted in Minnesota, for instance, found that work-release reduced the likelihood of a prisoner returning for a new crime, significantly increased the odds that he or she found a job, and upped hours worked and wages earned. It saved the state government some $1.25 million, too. Yet it barely exists on American shores, mostly on account of our extreme aversion to risk. Letting people off the prison compound simply makes people too nervous.
———
After the visit to Seralang Park, I eat an early dinner at one of Singapore’s famous hawker centers. They’re tightly regulated by the government and boast the safest street food money can buy. And their array of offerings, a convergence of Malay, Chinese, and Indian cooking, is a delectable manifestation of local multiculturalism. It’s said that Singaporeans enact ethnic tolerance simply by eating.
Back at my hotel, a message waits for me. “Baz!” comes the ecstatic-sounding voice mail. “It’s Jonathan! I’m home! Call me!” My twenty-three-year-old student is free, after six years behind bars. Thrilled, I dial rig
ht back.
“Is Jonathan there? This is his professor.” Pause. Then, on the other end, sobs.
“I never thought I’d hear anyone say that,” cries Jonathan’s sister, who’d answered the phone. I tell her how proud I am of her brother, and what a talented student he is. She passes the phone to him.
“I can’t wait to come to college, Baz,” Jonathan declares. I can practically see the grin on his face.
Hanging up, I’m still fighting tears. Prison homecomings never lose their emotional impact.
But for me prison homecomings have also grown bittersweet. Because they begin with almost childlike optimism—of the sort I just heard in Jonathan’s voice. The sort that borders on magical thinking, that makes Richard, a week before release, tell my class back home that he’s like that alchemist in the novel he loves, “because I can be transformed.” Optimism buoys my students through the days, hours, weeks of blunting postprison bureaucracy: ID offices, parole officer meetings, anger management sessions, this program and that program, and more government offices than I can keep track of. Optimism keeps them patient and calm as they learn to use technology born while they were in banishment. “Hi Baz,” one of my students texted me on his second day home. “Just practicing texting.” “When did silverware get so heavy?” marveled another, lifting a metal fork for the first time in thirteen years.
But this optimism usually has an expiration date. The honeymoon period with freedom comes to an end as the realities of life in the New Jim Crow set in. Jobs are scarce, old neighborhoods are perilous obstacle courses, and families have been devastated by years of separation. The postprison trauma sets in, too. When you went to prison at seventeen, time froze. So even if you’re thirty-eight, you’re still seventeen when it comes to relationship-building and communication skills and more. There are no solid support systems in place to help you work through this developmental roadblock and the trauma of what happened to you, or didn’t happen to you, behind bars. And since prison can thrust its inhabitants into a state of denial about their crimes, because surviving often demands the blocking out of anything too emotionally upending, there is no support, either, as you work through the process of grappling with your mistakes, which generally hit you with a painful thud as you return to the world.
Incarceration Nations Page 22