What does it take to make a hardened “gangster” cry? Sometimes it isn’t a fight, a cop, or a courtroom sentence. Sometimes it’s the moment a person finally realizes they’ve wasted their entire life — and they’re the one who has to live with it.
The story shared in your link follows Darren Tan, a former gang-involved drug offender whose teenage “dalliance” with marijuana spiraled into years of crime, crystal meth (“Ice”) addiction, and prison. By age 14, he was smoking marijuana, sniffing glue, taking sleeping pills, and was already involved in street-level hustles like selling pirated VCDs, collecting protection money, illegal gambling, and drug trafficking — often disappearing from home for long stretches.
By 18, Tan was sent to Singapore’s Reformative Training Centre for armed robbery and drug consumption, but the strict structure didn’t change him. After release, he returned to trafficking and was jailed again less than a year later — this time with an eight-year sentence. The cycle kept repeating: he was arrested again after release and sent back for another five years for possessing and taking drugs.
Prison didn’t just punish him — it broke him down. The article says Tan received 19 strokes of the cane for drug and gang-related offences and was placed in solitary confinement multiple times, including two months on one occasion after fighting with another inmate. On the outside he looked untouchable, but inside he was unraveling.
Then came the turning point: while locked up, he kept losing people he loved, including his grandmother. Alone in his cell, forced to stare at a future with “no meaning or accomplishments,” he hit what he described as rock bottom. That’s where he says he found faith — and decided, finally, to rebuild.
Instead of slipping back into the same life, he attacked education with discipline. He re-learned English he’d lost from years of speaking only Hokkien and Malay inside, read newspapers obsessively, and kept a dictionary and grammar book close. The payoff was stunning: he aced his A levels, scoring four As and a B, including an A1 for General Paper.
In 2009, he applied to law school and was interviewed in jail by two law professors. The article says they saw perseverance, maturity, humility, and honesty — and Tan became the first student with such a long criminal past admitted to law school at NUS.
The road wasn’t smooth. He entered campus at 31, older than classmates, without a laptop, new to email, and often alone during breaks. But he kept going — and in 2014, he was called to the Bar. He later trained at TSMP Law Corporation, then moved to Invictus, and began building a second life focused on service.
He co-founded Beacon of Life Academy in 2013 to help at-risk youth, joined the board of Tasek Academy and Social Services in 2014, and became involved in efforts tied to the Yellow Ribbon Fund to support former offenders restarting their lives. At home, the article describes a man now centered on family and faith — a husband and father who tries to eat dinner with his kids every night, remembering the damage he once caused.