COLUMN ONE : Singapore: What Price Justice? : A convicted vandal’s flogging sentence has been lauded by some crime-weary Americans. Others say the nation’s impressive safety record is not worth the loss in civil rights.

“Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world,” wrote Keith Kimball of Vallejo, Calif., in a letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher. “We should have those tough kinds of punishment in America.”

A Singapore court’s decision to sentence an American teen-ager to a flogging for spray-painting cars has produced a predictable nod of approval from many Singaporeans, long accustomed to their government’s firm hand. Perhaps more surprising is the wave of support that has emerged for its harsh legal system from Americans--reinforcing opinion polls in the United States that show worry about crime now equals concern about the economy.

In Singapore and the United States, newspapers have been inundated by letters supporting the sentence handed down last month against Michael Fay, an 18-year-old student.

Americans weary of crime increasingly favor stiffer penalties for criminals, such as the “three strikes” rule recently adopted to punish repeat offenders in California. According to one survey, 68% favor treating juvenile cases as severely as those involving adults.

In elevating Singapore’s administration of justice to overnight celebrity, the Fay case seems to have prompted many Americans to ponder two fundamental questions: Could the tough approach in Singapore, which places order before law, serve as a model elsewhere? And what is the cost of its impressive crime statistics in terms of individual freedom?

Fay was sentenced to six strokes of the cane administered by a jailer trained in martial arts, four months in prison and a $2,230 fine after pleading guilty to two counts of vandalism, two counts of criminal mischief and one count of possessing stolen property. His appeal of the caning sentence was thrown out by the country’s chief justice Thursday, and he was taken into custody.

Starting in the 1960s, when Singapore gained independence from Britain, the government imposed increasingly harsh penalties for a range of crimes, culminating in the last five years in laws against such offenses as armed robbery and drug trafficking, which carry a mandatory death penalty. Singapore has also jettisoned some traditional safeguards, such as jury trials, on grounds that guilty criminals were manipulating the system to walk free.

Visitors are invariably impressed by the country’s lack of graffiti and general feeling of safety. Women confidently stroll the streets late at night, the subway is clean, and muggings are rare. Gang warfare, a significant scourge in the 1950s, has been stamped out.

An opinion poll conducted for the government last year found that 82% of respondents believe that their country is “safe and secure.”

Statistics comparing the small city-state of Singapore and Los Angeles, with its roughly equal population, provide a dramatic contrast.

In 1993, 58 murders, 80 rapes, 1,008 robberies and 3,162 car thefts were reported in Singapore. Los Angeles Police Department statistics for the same period show 1,100 homicides, 1,855 rapes, 39,227 robberies and 65,541 car thefts.

Last year, Singapore had three robberies that involved guns. It has had no kidnapings for the last three years. The crime statistics have barely changed in five years.

“I have two kids, and I don’t have to worry about their safety,” said Davinder Singh, a lawyer and member of Parliament from the ruling People’s Action Party. “I don’t have to worry about them being exposed to drugs or alcohol. For me this is very important.”

There are fewer than 3,757 full-time police officers in the country, and they are rarely visible on the street despite the nation’s reputation as an authoritarian society.

All guns are outlawed, except those belonging to the police and armed forces. Gun possession carries a stiff prison term, and those who fire a gun during a crime face a mandatory death sentence.

Another difference with the United States is the makeup of the society itself: 77% ethnic Chinese and 14% conservative Muslim Malays living in relative isolation on a small island. There is virtually no poverty--80% of the people own their homes--and the family remains the backbone of society, with few divorces and children living at home until marriage.

As in many Asian societies, public shame, for the criminal and for his family, is a potent deterrent.

A more telling comparison might be drawn between Singapore and Hong Kong, whose residents are also Chinese but which imposes neither the death penalty nor caning. With a population nearly double that of Singapore, Hong Kong last year recorded 86 homicides, 103 rapes and 22 armed robberies involving firearms. Nonviolent crimes such as burglary were much more common than in Singapore, however.

The philosophical underpinnings of Singapore’s tough approach were laid out by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who was trained in the law at Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University. Lee remarked 30 years ago that “hard realities” meant that the phrase “law and order” had to be turned around so that order took precedence over the law.

“When a state of increasing disorder and defiance of authority cannot be checked by the rules then existing,” Lee said, “new and sometimes drastic rules have to be forged to maintain order: so that the law can continue to govern human relations. The alternative is to surrender order to chaos and anarchy.”

When Lee complained that justice was being thwarted on “pure technicalities,” the government in 1969 abolished the jury system. All defendants now have their fate determined by a single judge.

Singapore imposes the death penalty for 20 offenses. It is mandatory in murder convictions, firearms offenses and drug trafficking.

Anyone found in possession of at least half an ounce of heroin or an ounce of cocaine is presumed under the law to be a trafficker and faces execution upon conviction.

According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, between 1989 and 1993 the government hanged 47 convicts, of whom 22 were drug traffickers; 103 others are awaiting execution.

Singapore has long had a variant of the “three strikes” rule. When a criminal with three convictions is found guilty of a new offense, the judge must impose “preventive detention” of seven to 20 years.

Caning, the term for flogging done with a moistened, four-foot rattan cane, is imposed for rape, robbery and extortion, and for such nonviolent crimes as vandalism and employing illegal immigrants. People who are caned frequently go into shock and lose copious amounts of blood.

Responding to charges that Fay was singled out because he is American, the government said that 14 youthful vandals have been caned in the last five years and that foreigners receive equal treatment under the law. But a police spokesman revealed that there were 1,416 acts of vandalism reported in 1992 alone. Only 45 people were punished.

According to Singapore officials, sentences are intended not just as punishment but as a deterrent. A woman with a history of petty crime who was convicted in 1993 of shoplifting a $4 box of sanitary pads was sentenced to five months in jail and a $2,666 fine. She was so overcome by the severity of the sentence that she beat her head to a bloody pulp on the courtroom furniture.

When an 18-year-old man who is “educationally subnormal” repeatedly kissed a woman in an elevator, he was charged with molestation. A court sentenced him to six months in prison.

When the man’s lawyer appealed, Chief Justice Yong Pung How, saying “sentences have been too light; they are not having a deterrent effect,” increased the punishment to include three whacks of the rattan cane.

According to judicial records, judges increased sentences in 19 of 170 appeals filed in the first half of last year. This practice, not permitted in the United States, has prompted criminal lawyers here to joke that they threaten their clients with an appeal if they do not pay legal fees promptly.

Khoo Boon Hui, a senior assistant commissioner of Singapore’s police department, said in an interview that the country’s death penalty has been an undisputed success in reducing violent crime.

Armed robberies, which he said had proliferated to more than 150 a year in the 1970s, have been reduced to almost zero since the death penalty was adopted. Kidnapings have also been eliminated by the threat of execution, he said.

“The death penalty as a deterrent works when (the crime) involves planning,” Khoo said. “We want a person to not even contemplate a crime like kidnaping.”

But David Marshall, an attorney who was Singapore’s first elected chief minister under British rule, disagreed. “I see every year an increase in the number of death sentences imposed, which suggests that it is not acting as a deterrent,” he said.

Marshall said there is almost universal approval in Singapore for the way justice is administered, even among opponents of the government. Indeed, there are few people willing to publicly criticize the government’s approach.

Walter Woon, a law professor at Singapore’s National University, said he objects to the imposition of mandatory death sentences--though not to the penalty itself, especially after being mugged by a gunman while visiting Disney World in Florida.

“I’m in favor of giving discretion to judges to tailor sentences to fit the crime,” Woon said. He also expressed concern that as mandatory death sentences were used in an increasing number of crimes, criminals might be more likely to kill their victims.

Questions about the deterrent value of harsh sentences arise most often in narcotics. Not only are drug traffickers hanged, but the police can search for drugs without a warrant and can compel anyone suspected of drug use to take a urine test. If the test is positive, the user is forced to undergo “cold turkey” withdrawal and spend three months to three years in a drug rehabilitation center.

As a result, there is no place in Singapore where young people can be seen loitering on the street waiting to sell drugs, as happens in many U.S. cities. But despite such stringent rules, Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng admitted in Parliament last month that the number of hard-core addicts had risen from 2,228 in 1990 to 2,992 in 1993. He said the government is considering imposing jail terms and caning to deter drug users.

One area where Singapore has been remarkably successful is with gangs. Singapore is the only Chinese community in the world where underworld societies commonly known as triads do not exist.

Arguing that gangs intimidate witnesses against testifying in open court, Singapore wields Draconian detention laws against secret societies. Police can detain people suspected of gang or serious drug crimes without trial or formal charges. The detention decision must be approved by an independent panel, though the accused is not allowed to present a defense.

According to the Home Affairs Ministry, 277 members of secret societies are under detention without trial, as well as 409 drug traffickers and 39 people accused of other serious crimes. The detentions are for a renewable one-year period; one man has spent 13 years and 9 months in detention for gang activity.

“The bottom line,” said Lim Soo Ping, a deputy secretary in the Home Affairs Ministry, “is: Do you want these people on the streets or in the slammer? I want them in the slammer.”

As the detention law illustrates, Singapore’s attitude toward constitutional protection against abuse of state power is different from the West’s.

As former minister Marshall noted in an interview: “There isn’t the same respect for the individual in Chinese philosophy as there is in the Judeo-Christian philosophy of the West.”

In addition to abolishing jury trials, courts have ruled that accused people have no right to silence when being questioned by police, and a suspect who does not testify in his own defense at trial is warned by the judge that he will draw “inferences” from the failure to speak.

The courts have ruled that the right to legal counsel begins only after the police complete their investigation, which can take days. The right to counsel is also limited to those who can afford a lawyer, as the state does not provide lawyers to the poor.

“The whole emphasis has changed,” said J.B. Jeyeratnem, a defense lawyer who is one of the few critics of the government in Singapore who is willing to be quoted by name. “There is a gradual erosion of the great principle that no one is to be presumed guilty until he is found guilty.”

A group representing the Assn. of the Bar of the City of New York published a study of Singapore’s justice system in 1991, saying that despite the trappings of the British justice system left from colonial days, “the rule of law in Singapore today has given way to empty legalism.”

“In the British tradition, the Singapore government scrupulously applies the law on the books,” the report said. “But that law no longer restrains government actions or protects individual rights.”

Beatrice Frank, a law professor at New York University who was one of the authors of the report, said that because of restrictions on the legal profession and the judiciary, it is doubtful that an accused person can get a fair hearing.

Another controversial aspect of Singapore’s justice system is the extent to which coercion is used to extract confessions. Trials are relatively rare, with most accused people entering a guilty plea in hopes of winning a reduced sentence.

The government vehemently denies that coercion exists. Fay and two others accused in the vandalism case said they were slapped and threatened into making confessions, but police officials insisted that an independent investigation had found no abuse.

A civil case now being heard for malicious prosecution alleges that a police inspector held three men in prison for three years on a murder charge after one defendant was denied food, water and sleep for 24 hours and forced to stand on a chair and hold three telephone books at arm’s length until he confessed. The police later admitted that they were holding the wrong men.

A 1993 U.S. government report on human rights in Singapore said “there have been credible reports of police mistreatment.”

The government said such cases are rare, and errant officers are dealt with harshly.

“For the system to work,” Khoo said, “the public must have confidence in the police.”