The Yellow Ribbon that holds the key

Lim hopes the Yellow Ribbon Project will include all age groups in the future.

“A SIMPLE yellow ribbon’s what I need to set me free, ” sang Tony Orlando and Dawn, way back in 1973.

The song tells the story of a man released after three years in jail who asks his girl to tie a yellow ribbon on an oak tree to let him know if she still wants him. “I’m really still in prison and my love, she holds the key, ” sings the man. His girl, in reply, ties not just one but hundreds of yellow ribbons on the tree.

That song inspired the Yellow Ribbon Project (YRP), launched in Singapore 16 years ago to give ex-inmates a second chance in life and encourage the community to support them and their families.

Then Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman launched YRP in Malaysia at Sungai Buloh Prison in October 2018 to help ex-prisoners, supervised prisoners and young offenders at the Henry Gurney Schools to rebuild their lives after serving their sentences. The Home Ministry, Prisons Department, private sector and non-governmental organisations collaborated on the project.

In its first year, 40 inmates at Kajang women’s prison in Selangor were trained in online entrepreneurship. Another 12 students at the Henry Gurney School in Telok Mas, Melaka, and 90 supervised prisoners were trained in scaffolding work in a programme with construction and property development company Malaysian Resources Corp Berhad (MRCB).

Six companies are hiring first-time offenders who have committed minor offences, and the first and biggest employer is MRCB, which has 83 working in various sites in Selangor.

“MRCB will be taking in hundreds more after this, ” Syed Saddiq tells us in an interview the week before the Cabinet was dissolved.

“Many of their partners are very interested so they are helping YRP.”

Deputy Commissioner of Prisons (Policy Division) S. Gunasegaran confirms that the Prisons Department’s projects with YRP will continue.

Eighty Henry Gurney students from Melaka were trained in boxing, weightlifting and muay thai. A new centre of excellence for those three sports is under construction and due to open next month. That project was the brainchild of Emam Sapekri, a Henry Gurney graduate whom Syed Saddiq hired on contract.

“Emam came up with many programmes and ideas on how to get closer to the community, different collaborations with the private sector, and what we could do with Henry Gurney, ” remembers Syed Saddiq, adding that after almost a year, Emam is working in the private sector.

Under the YRP, youths who had been rehabilitated in detention or at the Henry Gurney Schools also reached out to almost 23,500 teenagers at schools across the country through the “Cerita Orang Gagal” awareness campaign, led by ex-Henry Gurney student Rizan Hassan, to show that those who had failed could overcome their past.

“We want to play a more proactive role in making the project a success, ” says Sam Lim, a coordinator with Malaysian CARE, which provides classes for inmates at three prisons and the juvenile delinquent correctional centre in Selangor, runs two halfway homes for ex-prisoners and hosts two peer support groups for ex-prisoners.

There’s room for YRP to grow, says Lim, who was at the YRP launch in 2018 as well as the launch of its 2020 programme last month: “We hope that more ministries will support the project and that it will expand to cover all age groups, not just youth.”