ABSTRACT
This paper examines the issue of criminality as it is expressed in social policy in Singapore. This small Southeast Asian country is characterized by great social and ethnic diversity, high rates of economic growth, but low crime rates. The relationship between these is pursued by examining the authoritarian political system and the social policies that have arisen from this to socialize and discipline the ethnically disparate and class-divided population. A brief survey of the social structure of Singapore, the role of colonialism in shaping the legal system, the legal measures introduced during the pre-independence anti-colonial and anti-communist struggles and the adoption of many of these by the new government of independent Singapore as weapons of social control introduces the paper. This is followed by an examination of the single-minded pursuit of developmentalism and security in the post-independence period and of the emergence of crime in political discourse as the paradigmi of social disorder and self-exclusion from the developmental state, and the relationship of these to the dominant political problem of the management of ethnicity and social differences expressed as concern with classification, a commitment to sociobiology and the constant attempts to define afield of “Asian values” based on a local reading of Confucianism as the basis of social cohesion. The essay concludes with a discussion of the relationship between Singaporean images of social order and the pursuit of a distinctive form of positivist modernism and the question of whether a “Singapore model" is applicable elsewhere in the world.
