Jail crack down in Indonesia

In Indonesia the police force is cracking down on jail time. The new policy is that those convicted of serious crimes such as terrorism, corruption, human rights violation , drug trafficking, etc...would be permitted no remissions in their sentences until they have served at least one third of their sentence. The issue to be faced now is to whom does this new policy apply? Does it apply to everybody jailed previously and recently? Does it only apply to those recently imprisoned? The main concern really is whether it involves retrospectively jailed criminals or not. If the policy includes them it means that remissions granted to prisoners in the past might become null and void since their one third sentence still has not been served. It also would mean that prisoners such as Australians Schapelle Corby and Renae Lawrence and terrorists who bombed Bali in 2002 would have to serve a much longer time in jail than anticipated before. The problem with this is that they have previously received sentence cuts. Would it be a violation of their rights to renege on these decisions?

This sort of thing happens all the time on a far less severe level. There are always changes in requirements for certain programs and degrees. Usually the way it is handled is that those who were instructed to meet the requirements previous to the new ones would be allowed to keep on with the ones with which they started. I think that is a pretty fair way to go about it. It wouldn't be a big problem if it wasn't for the fact that Corby and Lawrence and the Bali terrorists had been given remissions previous to this new policy. My question throughout this article was "what do they want to be done?" It certainly is not fair to give them this allowance only to take it away a moment later. Were it not for the weight of their crimes this shouldn't be a difficult decision at all if you ask me. While being as objective as possible I get the impression that the people on Indonesia would prefer these criminals to be held for longer based on the nature of their crimes. The problem is twisting that decision in such a light as to seem "right..." to twist it to where containing them longer is the right decision.

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