LEGAL AID AND THE WELFARE OF CONVICTED PERSONS WITHIN THE INDONESIAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
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Legal Aid, Convicted Persons, Integrated Criminal Justice System, Normative Disynchronization
Abstract
Article 1 paragraph (3) of the 1945 Constitution affirms Indonesia as a state based on the rule of law obliged to guarantee equality before the law, yet within the Integrated Criminal Justice System the guarantee of legal aid loses coherence once proceedings enter the post-conviction phase. This study examines the normative position of legal aid for suspects, defendants, and convicted persons within that system and identifies the regulatory gap responsible for its post-conviction collapse. It applies a normative juridical method with statutory and conceptual approaches, analysing primary legal materials from the Constitution through the Judicial Power Law, the 2025 Criminal Procedure Code, the Legal Aid Law, and the Corrections Law, read through substantive justice theory, the due process and crime control models, and the doctrine of civil death. The findings demonstrate a disharmony of rules (disynchronization) across four dimensions: legal subject, temporal scope, institutional and financial responsibility, and remedial mechanism, which cumulatively generate an operational legal vacuum for indigent convicts. Because legal aid regulation in Indonesia remains strongly pre-conviction centric, convicted persons undergo a form of legal de-subjectivation and lose effective access to assistance in pursuing case review, clemency, and conditional rights such as remission and parole. The study concludes that closing this gap requires a temporally, not merely institutionally, conceived integration of the criminal justice system, and proposes a six-step normative reconstruction beginning with the regulatory measures least dependent on new financing. Its contribution is a four-part typology of disynchronization applicable beyond the Indonesian context.
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