SINGAPORE – More support will be given to prison inmates and their families to cut the risk of intergenerational offending, after studies showed a high rate of criminality among children with drug-abusing parents.
Speaking on Sept 2 at the opening of the International Corrections and Prisons Association Annual Conference, Second Minister for Home Affairs Josephine Teo told participants that a 2019 study by the Singapore Prison Service (SPS) found that 22 per cent of children with drug-abusing parents had committed offences.
“A separate study by the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) in 2020 found similar concerns,” she said.
“Children whose parents had offended criminally were three times as likely to have contact with the criminal justice system themselves in the future, as compared with other children.”
Mrs Teo was referring to a landmark study by MSF and the National Council of Social Service of close to 94,000 parents and about 183,000 of their children.
Researchers found that children with a father who was convicted of his offences were 2.7 times as likely to be convicted of an offence themselves. This rose to 3.7 times if their mother was the one convicted.
Mrs Teo told participants of the conference that Singapore’s approach to correction goes beyond incarceration.
It includes efforts to rehabilitate and reintegrate former offenders into society, to reduce the risk of them going back to a life of crime.
“When corrections does these two roles well, society is safer and all of us are better off,” she said.
To prevent intergenerational offending, she said SPS will do more to build the economic, social and community capital of inmates, to uplift them and their families and children.
These include giving inmates access to skills training programmes.
Mrs Teo noted that in 2023, 4,000 inmates out of the 11,000 inmate population received skills training, in areas like precision engineering, media logistics and food services.
More than $2.7 million from the Skills Training Assistance to Restart Bursary (Star Bursary) has also been disbursed to close to 300 low-income prison inmates and former offenders who wish to pursue Nitec, Higher Nitec, diploma and degree courses.
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