Conscientious Avoidance: How Knowledge in the Prosecutorial System Shapes Indonesia’s Transition?

The dominant view of transitional justice studies stipulates that Indonesia has been undergoing political transition without justice. Departing from the recent development, this article attempts to encapsulate the conscientious avoidance of criminal prosecution of past gross human rights violation cases from a sociology of punishment lens. In this inquiry, there are three vectors that influence the current penal decision: knowledge and domination in penal system, human rights-inspired criminal victim protection, and the welfare assistance as a symbolic reparative justice performed as a neutralization strategy towards past atrocity crimes. This article finds that the decentralized model of social organization of knowledge within the penal system reflects the domination and authority in penal polities, which are composed of competing groups and interests. This complexity proceeds difficulties at the institutional level to translate the political motives of past atrocities into criminal justice knowledge. These lines of substantive direction of knowledge change in Indonesia’s penal system generates a future trajectory of past atrocity crimes prosecution.