My Summer Reading List Part II: Chain Gang All-Stars
Since the first post about my summer reading list, I’ve finished a memorable novel, Chain Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, that I thought readers of Sentences would enjoy. It’s an Afro-futuristic novel set in the not-so-distant future about what could happen if the prison industrial complex was allowed to totally take over “corrections.”
The novel portrays a bloodsport run by a private prison corporation where incarcerated individuals fight one another to the death with the promise of freedom — if they can survive. The fighters are celebrities with flashy names like ThurWAR and Staxxx, and large followings of fans.
Hosted by CAPE, the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program, the popular sport takes place on a field called the BattleGround. The major funders are Corrections Corporation of North America and Group Correction Corporation, two of the largest private prison corporations. Other corporate sponsors include Wal-Stores, Srivvy Wireless, and McFoods, and TotemWords, “the best in corrections.” This is obviously a thinly-veiled list of today’s prison profiteers like CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group.
The President of the United States at the time is Robert Bircher (a nod to the right-wing John Birch Society) who signed into law the Rightful Choice Act enabling those with long-term sentences to sign up for the death matches. If they survive three years in the CAPE program, they can earn their freedom.
The two heroes of the novel are both women, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, who are lovers, fighters, and eventually pitted against one another in a final death match. Different from prison stories that often put men at the center, Adjei-Brenya talks about the issues that impact incarcerated women. Staxxx is in prison for killing a male teacher at her high school who tried to force himself on her.
The plot also includes a prison abolition group, the Coalition to End Neo-Slavery, that holds protests outside of the BattleGround.
In the Acknowledgements, Adjei-Brenya gives a shout out to the Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow, based in the northwest suburbs of metropolitan New York, a group he organized with. He says in an interview that he became an abolitionist in the process of writing the novel.
Typically, I take issue with the argument that private prisons are the driver of mass incarceration. Only about 8% of prison beds in the US are owned or operated by private prison companies. In 2012, US government funding on prisons reached $89 billion. In truth, prisons are still largely a costly public enterprise funded by taxpayers.
Still, I was reading Chain-Gang All-Stars while also watching the Olympics — where athletes like Simone Biles and Stephen Curry were treated like celebrities, and celebrities like Snoop Doggy Dog promoted the celebrity athletes. This was followed by the Democratic National Convention where famous musicians like John Legend and Pink performed before political speeches.
Indeed, Adjei-Brenya has said that his female lead characters are based on Serena Williams who is “maybe the greatest athlete of all time,” but she is “reduced” to her sexuality.
Moreover, as the Democrats try to woo swing voters, they have compromised on their opposition to the death penalty, which was dropped from this year’s party platform. Meanwhile, Marcellus Williams, who claims his innocence, fights for his life in nearby Missouri where he is expected to be executed later this month.
This is life today in the US, but Adjei-Brenya’s celebrity death matches do not seem that far away.
At the top of the pile of my books for summer reading is Silky Shah’s Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. I got a preview of Silky’s book and their take on the presidential election at a panel for the recent Socialism Conference in Chicago. Silky is current head of Detention Watch Network. I’ve started reading the introduction to the book, where she tells the story of her own embrace of abolition throughout the years of 9-11, Obama (Deporter-in-Chief), and Trump when deportations reached 500,000 in 2019.
I just finished reading The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, by my good friend James Kilgore, with artist Vic Liu. James and Vic will both be present for a public event hosted by Education Justice Project on Thursday, October 17, 4-6 p.m., at the University YMCA — put it on your calendar! For my peeps in Chicago, they will be doing an event on Saturday, October 19, at the new PNAP space Walls Turned Sideways.
Lastly, we are working on a new issue of Stateville Speaks that will be dedicated to featuring the voices of people inside reacting to the closure of Stateville and Logan prisons. WBEZ reported on the transfers out of Stateville which have already begun. I talked to my friend Joe Dole on the phone in Stateville who said the situation is “already chaotic.”