Project 39A recommends Jocelyn Simonson’s article titled, ‘Police Reform Through a Power Lens’.

Project 39A recommends Ava DuVernay’s documentary titled, ‘13th’ and Michelle Alexander’s book titled, ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’.

The law and the criminal justice system, we are told, is logical and dispassionate. There is no space in it for the emotions and vulnerabilities of its stakeholders. Consider the life of a ‘prisoner’; incarceration isolates them from everyday life and restricts their autonomy so severely as to be dehumanising. Coupled with the experience of being isolated from their loved ones, feelings of powerlessness, anger and humiliation are common.

Project 39A recommends four Indian films – Court (2014), Visaranai (2015), Jai Bhim (2021) and Aakrosh (1980) – which center the experiences of the most marginalised members of society with the criminal justice system, and raise critical questions about the interaction between state power and structural inequality and its impact on justice delivery mechanisms.

What should we do when someone wrongs us? It is a question all of us must deal with at some point in our lives. It is also the question that sits at the core of the design of the criminal justice system: when someone commits a wrong against society, how should the society respond?

One of the most extensively debated topics in philosophy and science emerges from the tussle between free will and determinism. This debate has been the subject of numerous films and has added complexity to the storytelling.

Henry Shue, ‘Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb‘, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 2006 The most…