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SECURITY RING: Police officers, including a Ghurka, maintaining a security cordon at a bus stop along Stevens Road, near the Singapore Chinese Girls' School. -- ST PHOTO: WANG HUI FEN
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THE Internal Security Department's (ISD) detention centre off Whitley Road is set among a cluster of low-rise buildings near the former Police Academy.
Although it has no watch-towers, unlike other regular prisons in Singapore, people who have visited detainees there say security is 'very tight'.
The facility has 'many armed guards all around', they say, and there are 'adequate security measures in place' within the cells.
A room near the entrance to the centre, known as the 'outhouse' is used to host family visits and interviews with lawyers, and detainees are under tight security when they are brought to it.
The centre is guarded mainly by Gurkha officers.
The compound is also surrounded by high wire fences topped with barbed wire, and surveillance is kept via closed-circuit television cameras installed along the perimeter, among other means.
The other buildings housed in the complex include the ISD's heritage centre - a museum of sorts that records the department's work over the years.
The centre is not open to the public, but visitors to it include community leaders, civil servants, Members of Parliament, grassroots leaders and academics.
benjamin@sph.com.sg
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