The Comfort of Illusions

About the Lecture

Do you think we're confusing the satisfaction of seeing someone punished with the achievement of preventing harm?

Imagine that tomorrow we double prison sentences, lock up twice as many people, and criminalise ten new things. The public cheers, the politicians declare victory, and the law looks tougher than it has ever looked. But the violence continues, the vulnerable stay vulnerable, and the conditions that produce harm go untouched. We would have punished more people more harshly. Would we have made anyone safer?

We have a deep faith in punishment: that crime makes us unsafe, that criminals are the problem, and that harsher laws and longer sentences are the price of a safer society. Punishment reassures us that the bad have been identified, the dangerous contained, and the rest of us protected.

Anup Surendranath has spent his career inside that system. He and his team have represented nearly 200 death-row prisoners and thousands of undertrials. This lecture turns the question back on us: if we truly understood how criminal justice works, would we still believe what we believe about punishment — and would we care enough to change it?

The session explores:

Why punishment feels like safety, and why the two are not the same thing
What the criminal justice system actually does to the people who pass through it
Why obsessing over the rotten fruit means never examining the tree that keeps producing it
What it would really take to build a society in which fewer people are harmed

About the Speaker

Anup Surendranath is Professor of Law and Executive Director of The Square Circle Clinic (formerly Project 39A) at NALSAR University of Law. He studied law at NALSAR Hyderabad and completed his master's and doctorate at the University of Oxford before returning to teach at India's leading law schools and work on the ground with the criminal justice system. At The Square Circle Clinic, he and his team have represented nearly 200 death-row prisoners and thousands of undertrials. As an adolescent, he was convinced that justice sometimes required a good cop to burn the bad guy alive — a certainty he credits the 1994 Malayalam blockbuster Commissioner, and several summers of rented video cassettes, with instilling. Life, and a rather good education, complicated it.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from college who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive — unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.