<![CDATA[Indonesia's criminal justice system is undergoing one of the most significant paradigm transformations in its modern legal history, moving from a sentencing philosophy rooted almost exclusively in retribution toward one that increasingly accommodates restoration, reconciliation, and victim participation. This article examines how the 2023 Criminal Code and the 2025 Criminal Procedure Code, together with a dense layer of prosecutorial, police, and judicial regulations, have sought to reconcile the enduring demand for legal certainty and proportionate punishment with the growing recognition that many criminal conflicts are better resolved through dialogue, restitution, and social reintegration. Using normative-doctrinal legal research supported by a conceptual and comparative approach, the study analyses statutory texts, implementing regulations, and recent Indonesian legal scholarship to map the normative architecture of this reform and to identify the structural tensions that arise when two philosophically distinct paradigms are compressed into a single system. The findings show that although restorative justice has been formally codified as a ground for extinguishing prosecution and as a sentencing objective, its application remains fragmented across institutions, constrained by rigid quantitative thresholds, vulnerable to inconsistent discretion, and only partially reconciled with the due-process guarantees that retributive theory was designed to protect. The article argues that a durable balance requires not the replacement of retribution by restoration but a layered model of proportionate, victim-inclusive justice in which restorative mechanisms operate within clearly bounded categories of offense, subject to judicial oversight, harmonised procedural standards, and continuous evaluation. The article concludes by proposing concrete regulatory and institutional reforms capable of embedding restorative justice coherently within Indonesia's renewed criminal justice architecture without eroding the certainty and equal treatment that retributive principles continue to safeguard.]]>
