The Dark Side of Social Capital: Race, Recidivism, and “Reintegration”

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/2153368720974742
• Author: Narayanan Ganapathy
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Dark Side of Social

Capital: Race, Recidivism,

and “Reintegration”

Narayanan Ganapathy

1

Abstract

In investigating the problem of racial disparity in the recidivism statistics where the two

minority groups—the Malays and Indians—had been historically disproportionately

represented relative to the Chinese majority, the findings of the study led to a

deconstruction of the conventional inference that the under-representation of the

Chinese in the recidivism statistics implied successful mainstream reintegration and

criminal desistance. Extending the social capital theoretical framework to the criminal

landscape, this study put forth the view, based on interviews with 30 gang members

and former custodial officers, that the Chinese possession of more efficacious ethnic

capital, accessed and activated in the context of their membership in Chinese secret

societies, allowed for the resumption of criminal activities whilst capitalizing on the

symbiosis that organized criminal subcultures had with legitimate institutions. The

“dark side” of social capital, one that created “network closures,” was evident in the

cultural propensity of the Chinese to mobilize “guanxi” (relationships) that bridged

conventional social capital with criminal social capital. The net effect of this was the

facilitation and concealment of their criminality, thus reducing their representation on

their re-arrest and recidivism statistics.

Keywords

recividism, criminal social capital, Chinese secret society, ethnic minority, Singapore

Criminal justice states have long struggled to reduce their recidivism rates in light of

burgeoning prison populations globally coupled with the attendant challenges of

providing adequate and effective rehabilitative and reintegration opportunities for

1

Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Corresponding Author:

Narayanan Ganapathy, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, AS1, # 04-22, 11 Arts

Link, Singapore 119260, Singapore.

Email: socng@nus.edu.sg

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2023, Vol. 13(3) 303–\ 323

returning prisoners. That Singapore is one of the few countries that could claim

success in this domain is largely attributed to its nationally conceived “Yellow Ribbon

Project,” a reintegration program that aims to promote community acceptance of

ex-prisoners. The dismal prospects returning offenders encountered in the resettle-

ment process, exemplified in the high recidivism rates of the late 1990s, prompted the

Singapore government to implement a national strategy in 2000 to better coordinate

in-care and aftercare services offered by not only penal institutions but also com-

munity organizations such as halfway houses and work release camps. These efforts

had largely been responsible for reducing the recidivism rate from a high 44.4%for

the cohort released in 1998 to about 24%for the cohort 2017 (Singapore Prison

Service, 2019). The Singapore jurisdiction measures recidivism as inmates who are

imprisoned again for a new offense within 2 years of their release.

What has since emerged as a national concern, however, is the racial disparity in

recidivism statistics among the main ethnic/racial groups—Chinese, Malays, and

Indians, the latter two being minority groups. For drug-related offences for example,

the recidivism rate for the Malay and Indian offenders were 60.3%and 63.1%

respectively for the year 2019 (Central Narcotics Bureau, 2019), clearly dispropor-

tionate given the fact that they constituted only 13.9%and 7.9%of the national

population (Census of Population of Singapore, 2002), respectively. For that same

year, the Chinese recidivist rate was 53.4%even though they comprised around 78%

of the national demography. Additionally, 86%of the total Indian inmate population

had been incarcerated more than once, and a significant 78%three or more times

(Task Force Report on the Community-based Aftercare Services for Indian Prisoners,

2014). The “revolving-door cycle of arrest-incarceration-release-rearrest” (Travis

et al., 2001) is a concern among ethnic minority communities. Since neo-liberal

societies are marked by a tendency to exclude both those who fail in the economic

marketplace and those who fail to abide by the law and conform to community

expectations (O’ Malley, 1999), it thus raised a further question of whether there was

merit to presume that ex-offenders who did not appear on the recidivism statistics had

been “reintegrated” into mainstream society, a point that formed the crux of the

argument of this article.

Research Problem and Context

Using a social capital framework, Narayanan and Lian (2016) posited a materialist

perspective to address the question of why members of the dominant Chinese ethnic

group were better reintegrated post-conviction than members of ethnic minority

communities. They contended that divergent outcomes needed to be understood in the

context of the existing social structure and the extent to which ethnic minority groups

were constrained by the broader stratification system and networks of social relations

contained within it (Zhou, 2005). Specifically, they concluded that the quality of

ethnic networks and the social capital the returning prisoner could potentially gain

from these networks had produced differential outcomes of social reintegration among

the different ex-prisoner groups in Singapore. This research does not dispute but rather

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