The appropriation by Omega members of a hybridized racialized identity of Malayness and Chineseness has to be set against their ongoing experiences of structural marginality, both in prisons and in the free world. As discussed in Chapter 3, collective violence of an underclass racial group often serves as a substantial resource for its members’ accomplishment of and compensation for masculinity. Messerschmidt’s (1986: 58) observation that marginalized men may be materially deprived, but that they remain a formidable force in terms of gender is important for helping us appreciate the relationship between violence, masculinity and marginality, and the role that violence plays in the lives of the marginalized men in this study as they negotiate and navigate status attainment in Singapore’s racially plural and economically competitive society, pivoting at the intersectionality of race, class and gender. Jewkes (2005: 44–5) posits that the forms and ‘codes of overtly masculine behaviour that characterize working-class cultures are implicated in the replication and perpetuation of imprisonment’ and further argues that while ‘criminal behaviour in society may be regarded … as a learned response to the imperatives of masculine hegemony, [in the context of] prisons, masculinity may be seen as a learned response to the imperatives of the criminal inmate culture’. To put it simply, while the consequence of testing and asserting masculinity may be behaviours and actions that lead to prison, the same behaviours and actions may dictate how successfully an inmate adapts to prison. Inmates can thus bring their externally formed ideologies of manhood and consequent behaviours and actions into the prison, which are further embedded and strengthened within that environment. In this regard, Gilmore puts it in the following terms: ‘the harsher the environment and the scarcer the resources, the more manhood is stressed as inspiration and goal’ (Gilmore, 1990: 224, cited in Jewkes, 2005: 51).

Omega, prison masculinity and violence

While the shared experience of incarceration unites prisoners as a collective social group as they attempt to navigate the universal ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 1958), what is of interest to this study is the range of strategies employed by racial minorities to survive prison and adapt the convict code for the street, given their pre-prison backgrounds of stigmatization and marginalization.