I spent years in prison. Rehabilitation doesn’t end with counselling: Opinion

Source: Straits Times
Article Date: 28 Sep 2026

Support from the community ecosystem must hold long after the sentence ends.

Singapore has good reason to take some confidence from its rehabilitation record. The latest Singapore Prison Service (SPS) statistics put the two-year overall recidivism rate at 21.9 per cent for the 2023 release cohort, one of the lowest internationally.

SPS defines this as the proportion of local inmates under its custody who are subsequently detained or sentenced to imprisonment or a day reporting order within two years of release into the community.

Across the five release cohorts from 2019 to 2023, the overall two-year recidivism rate has remained fairly stable, moving between 20 per cent and 22 per cent. The longer-term picture, however, reveals where the challenge lies.

The five-year overall recidivism rate fell from 41.1 per cent for the 2016 release cohort to 36.6 per cent for the 2019 cohort, before rising to 39.3 per cent for the 2020 cohort. While Singapore has kept reoffending in the first two years relatively low, sustaining that change over a longer period is harder.

This underlines the importance of the wider social and family ecosystem around a former offender in sustaining change beyond institutional supervision.

Rehabilitation cannot be left to prisons and aftercare agencies. If we want fewer people returning to crime years after release, families, employers and communities have a significant role in making change sustainable.

After the sentence

Singapore has built a substantial rehabilitation and aftercare ecosystem around this principle. The Community Action for the Rehabilitation of Ex-Offenders, or CARE, Network now comprises eight core members and more than 170 community partners.

At the network’s summit in August, Law Minister and Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong noted that Singapore’s two-year recidivism rate had fallen from 40.1 per cent when the CARE Network was formed in 2000 to 21.9 per cent for the 2023 release cohort.

While that progress is significant, the harder question is what helps someone stay on course once the formal structures around him or her give way.

Employment gives one indication. For the 2020 release cohort, the two-year recidivism rate was 19.2 per cent among those who did not remain continuously employed for at least six months. It was 13.9 per cent among those who remained employed for at least six months and 7 per cent among those who sustained employment for 18 months.

The figures do not mean that a job alone prevents reoffending, but they show a strong association between sustained employment and staying crime-free.

Getting someone a job before release from prison is only part of the story. Keeping that job despite the everyday challenges is another. Support from family and peer relationships, together with the ability to remain gainfully employed, is critical in sustaining reintegration after release.

My own work sits in another part of this wider rehabilitation landscape.

At the Centre for Psychotherapy, I work with youths and adults at different stages of the criminal justice process. Some arrive while investigations or court proceedings are ongoing. Others require support as they move through custodial or community-based interventions and eventually back into ordinary life.

One pattern I have observed is that an individual who can make sense of his or her offence in the therapy room can still find the outside world much harder to navigate.

A young person can unpack how his peers influenced him during a therapy session and identify where he could have turned back. But such insight might not necessarily insulate him from social reality.

Those same friends may reach out to that young person again while trust at home, at school and at work remains frayed. In those circumstances, returning to old ways when overwhelmed can simply be a reflex.

It is in such times that rehabilitation has to hold outside the counselling room.

Rehabilitation not a performance

I was once incarcerated for drug offences after years of addiction and I experienced directly what imprisonment takes away: freedom, time with family and important moments that cannot be recovered.

Finding my place in society after release took time. Rebuilding trust meant showing up consistently and being present for my family, keeping my commitments and slowly proving I was reliable again. Only then did life outside prison begin to feel real. Having people who were willing to see more than my past mattered enormously.

The distinction I now carry into my work as a counsellor is that rehabilitation cannot remain centred only on what punishment has cost the person being punished. At some point, the story has to become larger.

What did my choices cost other people? What allowed me to keep making those choices? What responsibility do I have for what happens after I leave the prison gates?

That movement from experiencing consequences primarily as something happening to me, towards accepting responsibility for what I had done and what I would do next, is one I recognise when I see it emerging in others.

But attending counselling does not prove that somebody has changed. Neither do tears, an apology letter or knowing what to say to a counsellor, lawyer, probation officer or judge. Those things may be meaningful, but the more convincing evidence often appears when nobody in authority is watching.

Can someone walk away when friends encourage behaviour that previously got him or her into trouble? Can he or she recognise anger before it becomes aggression? Can someone struggling with addiction seek help before returning to an old pattern?

More fundamentally, can the person recognise the thinking that once made harmful behaviour seem acceptable and respond differently when similar circumstances arise?

Understanding why somebody offended makes the work of preventing another offence more specific. Two people may commit similar offences through very different pathways, impulsivity, peer approval, addiction, entitlement, distorted beliefs or difficulties managing emotion.

“I won’t do it again” may be a sincere promise whereas rehabilitation requires a plan. Much of that plan looks remarkably ordinary: returning to school, keeping a job, changing friendships, rebuilding relationships, tolerating discomfort, keeping commitments and becoming dependable.

A parent may be the first to notice the return of an old pattern. An employer may see somebody struggling and have an opportunity to address the problem before a job is lost. A mentor or friend may be the person who picks up the phone when the easier option is to return to old company or old behaviour. Such support allows change to take root.

None of this means that once somebody claims to have changed, society must simply believe him or her.

Families may need boundaries, employers may reasonably want evidence of reliability. Professionals still have to assess risk and a victim owes no relationship or forgiveness to the person who harmed him or her.

But there is perhaps another strong reason for the public to care about rehabilitation – the person who does not become a victim.

Every time someone steers clear from harmful behaviour, there is potentially someone else who is not harmed. That potential victim will never know that an intervention worked because there will be no police report, no court case and no headline.

Perhaps that is precisely the point.

Gopal Mahey is a senior counsellor and psychotherapist at the Centre for Psychotherapy.