This Review examines Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s speculative novel that critiques American incarceration by imagining a near-future system where prisoners participate in televised death matches to earn their freedom. Unlike popular cultural narratives centered on the wrongfully convicted—such as Just Mercy or The Shawshank Redemption—Adjei-Brenyah’s novel foregrounds characters who are guilty of serious crimes, challenging the innocence-centric framework that often dominates prison reform discourse. Drawing on the intellectual tradition of abolitionist thinkers such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba, the novel interrogates how violence is embedded in the structure of imprisonment itself and demands a reimagining of the system beyond selective sympathy for the innocent.
In our Review, we argue that while Chain-Gang All-Stars offers a radical critique that exposes the brutality and systemic violence of incarceration, it also mirrors and departs from real-world dynamics in revealing ways. Our analysis spotlights how the novel’s depiction of public spectacle in prison violence inverts reality, where prison violence is often hidden from public view, and underscores the challenges this presents for legal reform and abolitionist movements. Additionally, we explore the novel’s treatment of euphemism, showing how it captures but also simplifies the complex motives—public, private, and bureaucratic—that sustain carceral systems. Finally, we engage the book’s treatment of systemic heterogeneity in prison governance, noting that while the novel focuses on top-down structures, the reality of American incarceration is in fact marked by fragmented, decentralized systems resistant to oversight and comprehensive reform.
By situating Chain-Gang All-Stars within broader cultural, legal, and abolitionist debates, this Review illuminates the possibilities and limitations of fiction in advancing a radical critique of incarceration. It argues that while the novel productively dismantles several seminal myths surrounding innocence and punishment, it also invites deeper inquiry into the hidden structures and euphemisms that uphold carceral violence, ultimately contributing to ongoing conversations about the abolition of prisons and the pursuit of justice.