"Chain Gang All-Stars" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (2023)

 **A discussion of America's prison-industrialism complex and our near-fetishization of carceral solution to our society's problems, wrapped up in a blood-soaked adrenaline rush of a book**

The Rightful Choice Act, commonly referred to as Bobby’s Bloodsport Bridge, or BBB, B3, or B Three (passed under President Robert Bircher), states that under their own will and power, convicted wards of the state may elect to forgo a state-administered execution or a sentence totaling at least twenty-five (25) years’ imprisonment, to instead participate in the (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment) CAPE program. After three (3) years of successful participation in said CAPE program, said ward may be granted clemency, commutation of sentence, or a full pardon.

And that's the setup for this novel.  Convicted felons, the worst of the worst, can elect instead to participate in gladiatorial fights to the death.  One a week for three years, and you earn your freedom

The obvious point of this story is to point out how this is darkly plausible.  As these deathmatches, referred to in the world of the novel as "hard action-sports" become more and more popular, spawning punditry and commentary and merch and corporate sponsors and behind-the-scenes puff pieces and fantasy leagues and everything, we're faced with the fact that this is all fantastically plausible.  Adding to the, the book is peppered with footnotes dispassionately citing statistics about the United States' penal system--not the US of the novel, the real one.  Our US.  They are not pretty statistics

This book is not subtle.  It's not meant to be

Oh and yes, we have plenty of cameos from the "soldier-police" and the media and politicians of this world so very much like our own:

As such, the soldier-police were predictably increasing their presence around all Chain-Gang All-Stars events and many politicians had already appeared before holostreams to implore nonviolence. An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,” was “law and order,” and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror. It would have been funny if there weren’t so much blood everywhere.

I don't talk overly much about myself in these posts, because obviously I want to focus more on the book.  But it's ludicrous to pretend that my perspective and background don't inform how I interpret the things that I read.  I grew up as the child of a Public Defender, a defense attorney for poor, often minority, clients.  It rather ruined me for some genres!  I remember watching "Dirty Harry" for the first time, and at the point when the audience was supposed to be outraged at the system letting the bad guy walk because Clint Eastwood tortured a confession out of him, I was sitting there going, "goddamn right."  And so as I read this book, with its characters that have committed crimes, some of them horrible, and yet . . .

I loved this book because Adjei-Brenyah does something very brave, in that he doesn't take the easy way out.  Because he could have made his main characters falsely convicted, innocent bystanders who were framed or simply wrongfully convicted by the ironically-named "justice" system.  Or as a middle ground, he could have made them guilty but given them sympathetic backgrounds, reasons for their crimes.  And there is some of that:  One character was wrongfully convicted of murder, and in fact the first time he ever kills someone is in the ring; another character was convicted of murder for killing the man sexually assaulting her (the text notes in a footnote that women around the world are serving prison time for killing their rapist).  But plenty of the other characters did do what they're convicted of, and what they did was an awful thing.  One point-blank tells us "I killed a man my woman loved because he wasn't me."  Others did worse

And that's what I mean when I say that Adjei-Brenyah is not taking the easy way out.  It would have been easy to write a story about innocent people being victimized by the prison system.  That makes sense.  That's easy for us to wrap our head around, get outraged at terrible things being done to good people.  It's a lot harder to write a story telling us that, even if people did terrible things, that doesn't make it right for us to treat them that way.  One of the characters, someone who committed terrible crimes, is described as someone who "deserves no sympathy but won’t ever be undeserving of love."  That's a lot harder, trying to get us to be outraged at terrible things being done to people who did bad things--but that doesn't make it right

His name was Barry Harris, they said, and together they meant so much more. He was born and lived and loved and hated. We do not excuse him or the chaos and pain he thrust into the world, but because we see and know that what he did in a moment of confusion and rage was an assault on all that is sacred, we must remember and see that what we’ve done to him in retribution has promised him that he was right. Retribution of the same kind promises he was not wrong but rather that he was small. To punish this way is to water a seed. His name was Barry Harris. His name was Barry Harris. We’ve sacrificed him to feed our fear. To pamper our sloth.

And in the end, Adjei-Brenyah is asking to move past this to look at the way our entire society can be better:

'What does that mean? Aren’t there fewer criminals on our streets?'

'I mean that all those issues that you’re talking about are symptoms of our current system. Rampant poverty, a lack of resources for people suffering from addiction and mental health issues—those are difficult problems, but ones that can be addressed. But they aren’t. Because criminalization dehumanizes individuals and implicates them rather than a society that abandons them in times of need.'

I'll copy that in again:  "Criminalization dehumanizes individuals and implicates them rather than a society that abandons them in times of need."

In this book, Adjei-Brenyah does not excuse the terrible things done by the characters in his novel, nor by extension the awful things done by people in our real world.  But he asks us what portion of the burden we all bear, as members (and often beneficiaries) of this society.  It's not a comfortable question, and it's not meant to be

I loved this book

"I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this."