Recidivism of Local Inmates of Drug Rehabilitation Centres and Long-Term Imprisonment Regimes

14 Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Home Affairs for each year from 2012 to 2016, what is the percentage of local inmates detained, convicted and imprisoned again for a new offence within five years from their release from (i) the Drug Rehabilitation Centres (ii) Long-Term Imprisonment 1 and (iii) Long-Term Imprisonment 2 regimes respectively.

Mr K Shanmugam: Singapore Prison Service (SPS) currently publishes two-year recidivism rates, as this is aligned with standard international calculations for measuring recidivism and allows for meaningful comparison across time and jurisdictions.

Compared to longer time spans, two-year recidivism rates are a more sensitive measure of the effectiveness of prison regimes, including the Drug Rehabilitation Centre (DRC) and Long-Term Imprisonment (LT). After the two-year mark, ex-offenders' behaviour would tend to be influenced more by other environmental factors. Recidivism rates over a longer time frame will hence be higher.

The two-year recidivism rates for persons released from DRC, LT1 and LT2 from 2012 to 2014 are as follows. The two-year recidivism rates for 2015 and 2016 are not available yet.