Covid-19 in Prisons Flattening the Curve and the Need to Reform the Criminal Justice System During This Pandemic

Abstract

The policy of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights that has been issued to frees prisoners from prison to limit the spread of Covid-19 is actually the type of policy that has been taken correctly in this pandemic era. However, this policy has proved to be contrary to the policy issued by the Supreme Court of the Republic of Indonesia regarding accelerating criminal proceedings via teleconference. Due to these 2 contrary policies, the prisoners population inside the prisons would not decrease at all. The main objective of this research is to find out what would be the ideal concept to reduce the prisoners population inside the prisons in terms of limiting the spread of Covid-19. The research method used in this paper is the normative juridical method, with secondary data being the main data. The results have shown that the law enforcer policies on the status quo were really out of sync. Because of that, the author initiated two new concepts that have been introduced a long time ago but are rarely used by the  aw enforcer, those are the RNR-Concept and the concept of restorative justice to reduce the prisoners in prisons in order to limit the spread of Covid-19 inside the prisons.