Minority gangs in Singapore prisons: Prisonisation revisited

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 prisoners’ 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 reintegration’ 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 organisation 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’ (Rajah, 2012). In addition, reference to Singapore as a postcolonial state is of essence here, as it inherits the historical legacies of colonial racialisation as part of its nation-building project centred on multiracialism and the governance of ‘visible’ racial groups (Velayutham, 2017). The persuasion here is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to study the social organisation of gangs without appreciating the broader racial dynamics in multiracial Singapore society.

Set against the context of a racialised, postcolonial society this research seeks to examine the emergence of Omega, a prison gang comprising solely of ethnic minority Malays (hereafter gangs constituting ethnic minority members will be referred to as ‘minority gangs’) and explores how its members negotiate their racial, religious, gendered and gang identities while navigating the contours of racialisation and racism manifesting in complex and contradictory ways in prisons. That the pertinence of race affiliation, particularly among minority groups, has been noted in other prison contexts (Butler, Slade, & Dias, 2018; Pyrooz & Decker, 2011), but it finds a different trajectory in Singapore. As a multi-ethnic settler society, racialised gangs have historically been entrenched in Singapore since colonial rule not just in prisons but also in the streets (Turnbull, 1996). Better known as Chinese Secret Societies (CSS), these clan-based criminal organisations primarily protected the interests of indentured Chinese labourers and granted them autonomy from the British imperialists who monopolised the plantation economy, while engaging in a partnership with the latter to maintain order through extra-legal means (Nasir, 2016). Their continued offering of protective services to members of their ‘race’ in postcolonial Singapore through a symbiotic engagement with the law enforcement community for the purposes of social control (Ganapathy & Lian, 2002) helped CSS to gain prominence as an organised criminal enterprise with a distinctive criminal subculture, while relegating minority gangs to the periphery of the criminal marketplace. Theoretically, the genesis of Omega provides important context to the ongoing prisonisation debate prompting a need to reconsider the efficacy of the importation-deprivation divide and the applicability of contemporary frameworks such as the governance theory (Skarbek, 2014). It urges a re-composition of existing knowledge on prison gangs to include a host of other contextual factors; not least the historicity of race and class relations, and the hierarchies, ideologies and rivalries with which they are bound up in Singapore society. The first part of the study situates this empirical study within the theoretical field of prison sociology, to show how the prisonisation theories, classical and contemporary, play out in the context of an ethnographic case study outside the western context as all existing theories have been born, nurtured and applied to western jurisdictions, with a few exceptions (Jones, Narag, & Morales, 2015; Liu, 2005; Reisig & Lee, 2000). Next, it examines the modi vivendi and culture of minority gangs, and demonstrates that it is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle this inquiry from our knowledge of the racialised and hyper-masculinised lived experiences of minority members both in the streets and prisons. The case study of Omega helps to develop the concept of ‘reverse-importation’, or ‘exportation’, that challenges the linearity of the deprivation-importation models by documenting how gangs and gang subcultures, which have their origin in prison, in turn impact the social organisation of the illegitimate economy of the street. While the permeability of convict and street codes has been acknowledged in the broader literature (see Mitchell, Chantal, Pyrooz, & Decker, 2017; Pyrooz & Decker, 2011), this research contributes towards understanding the mechanisms of this transferability where the convict code of a prison gang, in this case Omega, is successfully transferred onto the streets not through a direct application but by selectively co-opting codes of the established Chinese criminal enterprises while maintaining a collective racialised identity that is distinct from other criminal fraternities operating in prisons and in the free society.

Methodology

It is well-known that conducting research in Singapore, particularly that of a sensitive nature (such as on gangs or criminality) is not easy. Many barriers do exist for the social researcher, and access is not always forthcoming as prison administrators are reluctant to allow outside researchers into facilities to conduct prison gang research. Official documentation is equally weak, and whatever material that exists is meant only for internal department use (see Buentello, Fong, & Vogel, 1991). Given the constraints, all interviews for this study were done outside prisons, thus one major limitation was that the researcher was unable to observe the phenomenon in ‘naturalism’, nor appreciate the social organisation of the prisons first-hand. Data for this study were generated using a qualitative approach based on case study, in-depth and life-history interviews. A combination of both ethnographic and semi-structured interviewing techniques was used to gather narratives from 23 former prison inmates who had been involved in both street and prison gangs. The informants were identified through the informal and personal contacts of the first author, and from ‘referrals’ that came from a key informant who, in drawing upon Whyte’s classic study, assumed the designation ‘Doc’. While these informants predominantly came from the Omega gang (n = 17), I also interviewed gang members from the Chinese Secret Societies (n = 6) to establish convergence and triangulation. In addition, six interviews were completed with former custodial officers who had knowledge about gangs in prisons and for documenting the ‘institutional viewpoint’. The inclusion of prison officers in the study was useful to gain their perspective on minorities and gangs, as minority prisoners are often considered to be ‘problem and disruptive prisoners’; while this might be the case, it does not vindicate the possibility of the institution’s role in creating and perpetuating what Elliott and Reid (2019) termed as the ‘controlling images’ of minority peoples which are ‘key in maintaining intersecting oppressions’ (Collins, 2000, p. 69). The selection of the interviewees was informed by a theoretical sampling approach where the ‘groups are chosen as they are needed rather than before the research begins’ (Glaser, 1992), and where the initial sample was determined to examine the phenomenon where it is found to exist (Chenitz & Swanson, 1986). Supplementing the theoretical sampling approach was elements drawn from quota sampling techniques to ensure representation from ‘all divisions within the arena of study’ (Rubin & Rubin, 1995, p. 69). All informants were included solely on the basis of their willingness to participate in the study. On most occasions, a semi-structured interview style was adopted, but discretion was exercised whenever it became necessary to deviate from the interview guide in order to delve deeper into the informants’ narratives with occasional prompts from the interviewer. As with all qualitative approaches, the researchers were able to establish a more nuanced understanding of the informants’ perspectives, their ‘everyday experiences’, and an interpretation of the world around them (Stake, 2010), in addition to contextualizing informants’ ‘emic’ perspective against the broader historical, cultural, structural and institutional factors. The interviews were conducted between 2017 and 2018. The relatively long period of data collection was primarily due to problems of access and arranging interview sessions with gang members who were ‘unusually suspicious’ (Berk & Adams, 1970, p. 61).

Admittedly, conversations with ex-prisoners were difficult on three issues. First, the social distance between the investigator and his informants made the task of establishing and maintaining rapport difficult, a problem compounded by the fact that prisoners, similar to members of the many groups most marginal to the larger society have had long experience in environments that take on a number of characteristics of a Hobbesian war of all against all … and this kind of life experience will make participants extremely suspicious of anyone, let alone outsiders. (Berk & Adams, 1970, p. 60)

Second, the subject of gangs was a sensitive matter to all the stakeholders of the prison society and open conversations of it were not only disallowed by the official dictates of the ‘zero-tolerance policy’ of the prison authorities toward gangs but generally frowned upon by the ex-inmates/gangsters themselves unless such disclosures had been warranted in exceptional circumstances such as when marking out territories between disputing factions, or in ‘private spaces’ (Jewkes, 2005). Many of the (ex)prisoners the first author spoke to were still on electronic tagging and/or under police supervision order, a regime meant to monitor high-ranking gang members beyond their prison sentence. Holding conversations with active gang members on their criminal activities held certain risks for the interviewer as well for it was deemed that a person had committed a crime, according to Singapore law, if that person had failed to report a crime to the authorities. To mitigate the problems of conducting sensitive research, all informants were assured of anonymity, and thus names which appear in this study are fictitious.

The primary author basically resorted to mental note-taking (thus rendering data loss unavoidable), as it was neither possible nor preferred by the informants to have the conversations recorded. The author’s identity as a researcher was made known and the intention to publish eventually an account of prison life was communicated to all participants. Ronald Frankenberg’s (1982) cautionary note on fieldwork proved useful to mitigate the many problems of access and maintaining rapport with a deviant population. Cognizant of what he said that ‘questions he (fieldworker) is asked are more important than the questions he asks’ (Frankenberg, 1982, p. 50), conversations with the ex-inmates were thus made intently broad, non-threatening and centred on their incarceration experience leading to a dialogic exchange of narratives between the researcher and the researched. Initiating conversations around the questions of whether the ex-inmate was a first-timer, the length of time spent in prison and, if the informant was acquiescent enough, the crime he was convicted for always proved useful to making that preliminary introduction. Themes explored in these interviews included the ex-prisoners’ involvement in criminality before incarceration; experiences of and motivation for gang participation during incarceration; interactions between gang members in prisons; and the continuation of gang membership post-incarceration. In almost all conversations regarding the prisoners’ incarceration experience, they led to discussions about their gangs without any prompting which in itself was a clear attestation that surviving incarceration and gang membership were intrinsically and inevitably tied to each other. Of particular salience was how (ex)prisoners articulated their masculine and gang identities which almost always intersected with narratives of racialisation and marginality, real or perceived, both inside and outside prisons. Interestingly, these narratives and ‘prison stories’ of gang involvement and exploits of power and violence were more pronounced among minority prisoners which in themselves held much theoretical significance for the current investigation. The racialised and gendered experience which was central to understanding the social organisation of the prisons and the role of gangs in it offered themselves as ‘emergent categories’ that have ‘proven theoretical relevance to the evolving theory’ (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 177).

Prisonisation and gangs

Gang formation in the context of prisons has largely been centred on theories of prisonisation. As first conceptualized by Clemmer (1950), prisonisation refers to an induction process by which the incarcerated prisoner is assimilated and socialized into an existing prison culture. Two models have dominated the discussion; first, the deprivation model which suggests inmate subculture as indigenous to the prison; and second, the importation model which views it as an extension of the street criminal culture being imported into prison.

More recently, political scientist Skarbek (2012, 2014) identifies the declining efficacy of importation and deprivation models amidst in an increasingly complex inmate social system to account for the emergence of prison gangs. Positing gang formation in prisons as a ‘recent’ phenomenon, Skarbek (2012) argues that the failure of the prison system to sustain the convict code as a normative reference for prisoners’ behaviour due to increasing prison populations – many of whom were first-timers – and over-crowding in prison facilities since the 1970s, led to inmates’ increasing need for alternative forms of governance. This was made possible through the formation of hierarchical inmate organisations (i.e. prison gangs) where members are recruited from the prison population itself. These prison gangs then generate credibility through their strategic use of violence to protect their members; mitigate conflict in prison; prey on other inmates and entrench themselves as central players in illicit markets.

Drawing on the Buentello et al. (1991) gang development model, Gundur (2018, 2019) elaborates that the genesis of prison gangs begins with in-prison solidarity groups primarily providing intimate support, which then advance into codified collective behaviours that ultimately evolve into ‘protection groups’ followed by ‘predator groups’ before becoming full-fledged gangs. In drawing upon Barrio Azteca, a Hispanic gang based in Texas, USA, as case study, Gundur (2019) finds that tactical decisions along with specific market demands enable the prolonged survival of the prison gang into organized criminal organizations in the free world. The formation of Barrio Azteca was formalized under the charismatic leadership of José and provided solidarity for inmates from El Paso and Juárez. Thereafter, entrenching itself in the illicit economy, specifically in drug trade, trafficking and other related businesses, Barrio Azteca established a rigid hierarchy by instituting rules, objectives and demanding allegiance from its members – that distinguished it from street gangs primarily comprising youths – who were recruited not only in prison but also in the streets thereby dominating the retail drug market in the free world through their extensive transnational networks with drug cartels within the country and across the border.

Vertically organized groups like Barrio Azteca, Gundur (2018) notes, with its extensive prison networks and strong authority and control within the prison had deeper interests to establish itself in the free world as organized criminal organizations that enabled its released members to manage and partake in the share of other criminal enterprises.

Prison gangs tend to be racially segregated and often signified through physical markers like tattoos that immediately identify them as members of particular gangs (Roth & Skarbek, 2014; Worrall & Morris, 2012). While inter-ethnic conflict in prisons seems expected (Worrall & Morris, 2012), some scholarship points out that depending on the number and size, prison gangs can perform informal policing functions of members and even resolve social and commercial disputes amongst inmates maintaining social order in prisons (Gundur, 2019; Roth & Skarbek, 2014). This includes offering up one of their members to other gang or taking down the member himself if the gang member is deemed to have disrupted illicit exchange in the underworld economy (Gundur, 2019).

Most of the literature argues that prison gangs were not imported street gangs nor are street gang members founders of prison gangs (Skarbek, 2012, 2014). Skarbek’s ‘governance model’ explaining the rise in prison gangs, for instance, finds some convergence in the Singapore context. Specifically, the growth of drug offending prisoners, and the exponential increase in the prison population from the early 1990s where there had been an 180% increase in the prisoner population from 5476 to 15,334 (Walmsley, 2019) would arguably have impinged on the clarity of prison norms, resulting in an unregulated inmate system, and the rise of prison gangs to fill the void, as noted elsewhere (Butler et al., 2018). Fong (1990) and Buentello et al. (1991) documented how the declaring of the ‘building tenders’ system, which served to enforce the inmate code and maintain order in addition to being an indispensable aspect of the intelligence network for prisons administrators, as unconstitutional by the American courts in the 1980s led to a situation where prison gangs competed for power and dominance in an attempt to fill the power vacuum. Paradoxically, while prisoners’ rights were strengthened by the courts, judicial intervention unexpectedly weakened the legitimate authority of the prison administration to achieve institutional safety and correctional goals (Marquart & Crouch, 1985). As prison administrators struggled to exert unbridled control over the inmate population, the climate of diffidence propelled many inmates to organise themselves for self-protection and power dominance. Many of these groups morphed into prison gangs delving into organised crime (Jacobs, 1977). However, these historical antecedents and inefficacious governance alone cannot explain the emergence and persistence of racial minority gangs, and the fundamental question of why only minority gangs tended to have their roots in prisons – and why prisons. The relatively recent work of Mears, Stewart, Siennick, and Simons (2013) revealing an association between inmates ‘adherence to the street code belief system and inmate violence’ (p. 717) seems to be leading to what many other theorists had done; to break the ‘theoretical stalemate’ (Reisig & Lee, 2000, p. 24) by adopting an ‘integrated explanation of inmate behavior that encompasses elements of both the importation and deprivation models’ (Cao, Van Dine, & Zhao, 1997), on the premise that these models ‘explain more variance together than either one separately’ (Paterline & Peterson, 1999, p. 427). This synthesis position, borne through much empirical work, reflects Jacob’s (1979) assertion made back in the late 1970s that ‘it is possible both to speak of prisoners as a class or group and, at the same time, to recognize this class to be internally fragmented’ (p. 21). As Butler et al. (2018) note, the emphasis on both pre-existing divisions in society and prison environments help explain variation in the dynamics of prison gang formation and their respective capacities to monopolise informal governance in prisons.

This paper offers a nexus between the importation-deprivation models and the more recent emphasis on the emergence of prison gangs within prisons into organized criminal enterprises (Gundur, 2018, 2019; Skarbek, 2012, 2014) by drawing on the organizational trajectory of a racial minority gang in Singapore, Omega, as case study. In particular, the paper argues that the experiences, ideologies and orientation of Omega, a gang formed in prison, are qualitatively distinct from those of the majority Chinese inmates where experiences of racialisation and the attendant narratives of social exclusion, subjugation, racism, and discrimination have a pervasive effect on constructing intra-minority and minority-majority relationships in the prison context. Much of this is borne out of their exclusion – on account of race – from the marketplace of illicit activities of the streets. By assuming such an analysis, this research is not only able to show how the historical, structural, institutional, biographical and external determinants interrelate in practice in the penal space to influence prisoners’ adaptation strategies, but also offer a rethink on the importation-deprivation interlock through the concept of ‘reverse importation’ or ‘exportation’, a concept which seeks to chart the relationship between prison experiences and post-prison identities. By doing so, this research overcomes the generic orientation of the importation and deprivation models by being 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 not only ‘survive’ prisons, but find sustenance in the illicit economy by adapting the convict code for the street. Using Omega as a case study to illustrate the permeability of both the convict and street codes as well as the prison and street gangs (Mitchell et al., 2017), this research illuminates both the context and the mechanics of this reciprocal transferability of criminal cultural codes and the inter-relationships between gangs.

The emergence of Omega: Formulating the convict code

Formed in the late 1980s in prison, this mono-ethnic gang, considered to be the most significant Malay secret society in post-independent Singapore, serves to protect and promote the interests of the Malay-Muslim inmates against the ‘infidels’ (non-Malay/Muslim prisoners and staff) who were purportedly compromising their welfare and rights. The Omega gang operates with strong racial and religious overtones as its primary objectives are to ‘create a “Muslim Brotherhood” in the criminal underworld by incorporating the Islamic doctrine of “Fisibilillah” (for the sake of God), and stage a “counter-crusade” against the Malay-Muslim members of Chinese Secret Societies’ (Ganapathy & Balachandran, 2019, p. 11). The word ‘Omega’ has several acronyms but two remain popular: ‘Our Men Establish the Greatest Association’, and ‘Orang Melayu Enter Gangster Area’, where the Malay words Orang Melayu refer to the ‘Malay People’. According to Nasir (2016, p. 2), ‘the name makes reference to the spatial dynamics in gang membership, denoting an attempt by the Malays to gain a foothold in a domain already dominated by the Chinese’.

For many of the minority gang members, a prison sentence becomes the catalyst wherein their experiences of marginalization in legitimate and illegitimate society find convergence – physically, socially, economically and politically. Many fulfil their sentence with ambivalence:

… when you see so many from our race here, it tells us that we are all screwed up – the lowest in the barrel. But it’s also time to do something about it since we are ‘big’ (in numbers) here. (Ibrahim, Omega member, 23)

The genesis of an exportation model: Reinventing the street code

The impetus for the theoretical framing of the exportation model of prisonisation could be traced to the expansionist policy of the Omega gang. Positioning itself as a defender of Malay-Muslim rights driven by ethno-religious rationalizations that served to amass symbolic, reputational and social capital, the Omega gang was set to expand exponentially. Nafis (2008, p. 1) documented how the Omega gang relied on a religious narrative, interlaced with Jihadist overtones, to proliferate its membership:

Bismi-llahi ar-rahmani ar-rahimi (In the Name of Allah Most Gracious Most Merciful)) Omega is jihad and Omega members are mujahedeen. To jihad is to arrive in the way of Allah, and Omega symbolizes a struggle. Omega members struggle, sacrificing money, blood, limb and life to prevent the oppression of Malay Muslim IDs (prison slang for prisoners)… Omega wages war to stop the Chinese SS from oppressing Malay Muslims, in prison and in the underworld. (Pledge of Martyrdom to Establish Omega Secret Society)

A pertinent structural characteristic of Omega, which also holds much sociological significance in a plural society such as Singapore, is the racial membership, solidarity and self-identification among its members. In fact, the new ‘master status trait’ (Wacquant, 2001) for these prisoners is racial affiliation, pointing to gang identities, which often manifest in complicated and complex ways, as a clearly racialised phenomenon. The formation of gangs along racial and ethnic lines is in many ways a reflection and product of the Singapore State’s emphasis on two revered institutions of meritocracy and multiracialism where the former maintains a strict adherence to the ideal of procedural equality while the latter celebrates the racial diversity of the nation as a fundamental national ideal. The struggle to balance these occasionally conflicting ideals has yielded an interesting mix of policies that seek to sort individuals ‘objectively’ while allowing racial groups to compensate for their perceived social and economic advantages. The management of ethnic diversity through formal multiracialism identifying the resident population along colonially inherited categories of race – ‘Chinese’, ‘Malay’, ‘Indian’ and ‘Others’ – on one hand foregrounds the pursuit of public policies to prevent racial segregation in electoral politics, neighbourhoods and public educational institutions. However, it also offers a legitimate space to hierarchically order race/ethnic categories, ‘with the Chinese on the top, the Malays on the bottom, and the Indians straddled in the middle. This hierarchy is reflected in income, education, housing and virtually every social and economic category’ (Moore, 2000).

Historically, the poor economic status of the Malays can be traced to their exclusion from the colonial economy that positioned them in opposition to the industrious Chinese, whose economic acumen and expansive trade networks rendered the latter as better allies to British imperialist ventures (see Ganapathy & Balachandran, 2019, pp. 5–6). Unsurprisingly, the pervasiveness of the cultural deficit rhetoric to explain away the ethnic minority community’s disadvantaged economic status has prevailed post-independence, accentuating Malay cultural inferiority, and hence marginality, in contemporary discourses. ¹

Although the impetus for the initial formation of the Omega gang came from a need to provide in-prison support and protection to Malay-Muslim inmates, its organisational structure, thereafter, assisted to transform itself into a criminal enterprise. While the evolutionary trajectory of the Omega resembled the structural transformation of prison gangs such as the Texas Syndicate and Barrio Azteca, what is unique in the case of Omega is the racial imperatives that served as catalyst in the transformative process. This was achieved through the arduous performance of a ‘hybridized racialised masculinity’ that strategically blended elements of material success associated with ‘Chinese-ness’ with a persona of fearsome and fearless ‘Malay-ness’. The following excerpt was most insightful:

To go into a world controlled by the Chinese is no easy task at all. The Chinese are everywhere controlling everything from top to bottom. Who could go in, how did we go in you may ask? It’s simple, we need to become like them, think money, think big, pay people to get things done. But that’s not enough, we need to put fear into people first, get them to respect us, we need to bring back the Malay pride which was destroyed by the infidels years ago outside and in prison. What did we do? We began to chop people up, to show everybody not to mess with us. We meant business. God has given us the strength, we just put that into good use, for a good cause. (Zul, 45, former CL detainee)

Discussion and conclusion

The extent to which behavioural patterns in prison are attributable to the deprivations associated with incarceration or are carried into confinement has been a matter of considerable debate in criminological research. What is of interest is that both the deprivation and importation models subscribe to linearity. In other words, they explore the ways in which the prison cultural praxis affects prison behaviour, or how the outside world impacts on and influences prison culture. While this linearity has been critiqued, and a consideration of how prison cultures emerge from the institution to circulate and shape culture in the free world has been acknowledged in the scholarship (Crewe, 2007; Mitchell et al., 2017; Philips, 2008), there has been limited substantive research directed towards explicating the reciprocal association between prisons and the streets. This study attempted to fill this gap by focusing on the adaptive and contextual factors that underpin the genesis of prison gangs which tended to be formed exclusively by minority prisoners; that revelation itself invites a sociologically nuanced analysis of minority prisoners’ experiences of racism, discrimination and social exclusion, which themselves are constitutive of race-relations both in the community and in prisons. In particular, this study examined the specific cultural, structural, institutional and historical dynamics in Singapore society that have contributed towards the emergence of the Omega gang comprising exclusively Malay-Muslim (ex)prisoners. These minority prisoners fit the characterisation of ‘guerillas’ who have appropriated space in prisons, precisely because they are unable to do so in the illegitimate society, as a means to counter, resist and subvert existing Chinese-dominated penal subcultures, and thereafter, the monopoly of the criminal fraternity by the dominant Chinese-based secret societies of the streets. In doing so, this research suggests that a process of ‘reverse-importation’ or ‘exportation’ is significant, whereby the cultural norms originating from the closed world of the prisons are brought out to be circulated in the outside world shaping praxis.

The exportation model proposed here also helps to overcome the conceptual weaknesses of the deprivation and importation models linked to the presumption of a monolithic, homogenous and isolated prison culture which is conceived as the result of a collectively adaptive response to the conditions of imprisonment. Although the importation model somewhat has mitigated this weakness by emphasising the influence of external statuses and behaviour patterns on prisoner subcultures (Philips, 2008), it cannot adequately explain the form the prisoner subcultures assume and the differentiated strategies offered by the various racial, class and gender groups within prisons. Theoretically, the empirical investigation into the formation of the Omega gang calls for the need to merge the deprivation and importation models of prisonisation to appreciate why and how their racialised adaptation to the prison experience is a direct consequence of the unequal power arrangement between the minority and majority racial groups in both the legitimate and illegitimate society. Undoubtedly, socialisation into prison life is dictated by conditions of captivity (deprivation model), but the form the process assumes has to be traced beyond the boundaries of prisons and through a contextualization of the pre-prison behaviour patterns and characteristics of individual inmates and groups (importation model). This research extends the conceptualisation of prisonisation by not only taking into account how different classes of prisoners adopt different means of adaptation to adjust to different pains and deprivations which are often delimited by their pre-prison experiences and identities; criminal histories; construction of masculinities and masculine statuses; and the institutional imperatives but also how the in-prison adaptations affect the construction of post-prison identities, and how they shape and are shaped by gangs on the outside. The intent is to provide a comprehensive sociological examination of the prison milieu by capturing the iterative and interactive effects between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’, and vice versa, thus extending the analysis beyond the deprivation-importation impasse.

The exportation model as conceived here (see Figure 1) maps the street code and convict code as distinct contexts but not mutually exclusive for the emergence of gangs (as marked by the dotted line). Here, the organizational evolution of minority gangs is traced through the hyper, ‘protesting’ and racialised formulations of hegemonic masculinity as a response of minority prisoners to their marginality in licit and illicit societies. In the confines of the prison, violence through identification with a mono-ethnic gang is one way through which minority prisoners ‘visibilise’ their (protest) masculinity as they seek to challenge, resist and subvert what they view as ‘Chinese’ hegemonic power and dominance in criminal underworlds. Conversely, the precedence of the street code and street gangs for Chinese prisoners means that participation in prison gangs is quite unnecessary to gaining material success and experiencing criminal mobility for they go back to their established street gangs upon release. In this sense, Chinese prisoners are seen to subscribe to what Irwin (1977) has termed as ‘doing time’ – a mode of adaptation where prisoners still keep their commitment to the outside life and see prisons as a mere suspension of that life, thus do not attempt to alter their patterns for it is not in their material interest to do so, a stark contrast to the position taken by racial minorities. Because masculinity is a behavioural response to particular conditions and situations, minority inmates do masculinity within prisons in a specific way that reflects their position in the class and racial divisions of labour and power. Pointing to the effects of these divisions, Jean-Paul Sarte’s (1963) discussion of the ‘project’, e.g. illustrated the important attraction of the gang to many lower-working class, racial-minority boys where the life of these men were determined ‘not by the possible but by what is impossible’ (Messerschmidt, 1993, p. 103); because they are, in effect, denied many resources for constructing hegemonic masculinity, these young men undergo, in Sartre’s (1963) words, a ‘subjective impoverishment’ (pp. 95–96). Ethnic minority prisoners similarly experience a ‘subjective impoverishment’, having been denied access to the legitimate opportunities because of social class, and equally denied participation in the illegitimate economy because of race turn to those hegemonic masculine ideals that remain available in prisons, such as physical violence. Based on the idealized conceptions of hegemonic masculinity, minority prisoners participate in gang violence in prisons not only to gain status but also to protect one’s ‘race’. As this research has shown, minority prisoners, who bond into mono-ethnic gangs that provide a competitive arena in which an individual proves himself a man among men, would go on to have his gang ‘exported’ to the streets upon release. The reformulation of the convict code that juxtaposes racialised and gendered codes of ‘protest’ masculinities’ with a co-optation of the street codes of criminal entrepreneurialism of the Chinese gangs provided Omega members the organisational impetus for a post-prison exportation to the streets. Theoretically, apart from adding on to the stock of knowledge on prisonisation, this research was also able to illuminate the malleability of hegemonic masculinity, and how prisoners construct varieties of masculinity through specific social interactions inside the prison milieu and beyond.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

‘Exportation’ model of prisonisation: adaptation of Omega as a street gang.