This chapter examines the colonial legacy of criminal regulation by analysing how the process of criminalisation has been framed in a postcolonial context. Focusing on Indonesia’s penal history, it investigates the effects of the colonial legacy on the differentiation between private and public harms through criminal law in a postcolonial society. Our chapter explores three crimes that have been carried over since the Dutch colonial period: treason, insults to the head of state and offenses against public decency. While contemporary liberals may see this criminalisation as a way to limit individual freedom, it, in fact, exposes the mechanisms of postcolonial social control. This situation largely stems from ambiguous judicial interpretations regarding public and private harms. The chapter examines these judicial practices, illustrating how judges interpret and justify the enforcement of these offenses. It shows how postcolonial penal and social controls have woven together past colonial experiences with the future of penal regulation in light of changing sociocultural conditions today. This legal temporality is crucial for the advancement of Southern criminology, as it could provide a new perspective on the public-private divide and introduce a new form of social control that nurtures a unique postcolonial identity.