I wanted to give this 5 stars, but I’ve got a little too many nitpicks for it. I think this is a great read, very compelling, very well written on a sentence and chapter level. I love literary writing plus SFF when it’s done right, and this was done (mostly) right.

For me the author’s short story past was a plus. I felt like each chapter was well structured in a way you often don’t see in novels, and I attribute that at least partially to his experience with short stories. I didn’t mind the scale of POVs for the most part. The one-off chapters from Lasser and Mickey Wright were great.

The arc of Thurwar and Staxxx is the best part. Their love story (to be clear they are partners at the start, but we root for them), their conclusion, what they go through together. I predicted some of what happened, but I wasn’t sure until the very end what would happen in the last battle.

I appreciated how the author is trying to push us - is this kind of treatment ever okay? Even when the offender is a murderer or a rapist? And the author says no, torture is never okay. If anything I wanted more reflection on this.

My quibbles:
1) I found the protester POV chapters too insubstantial to be worth including. They provide the outside perspective sometimes, but I don’t think we need it. Or we needed a lot more of it. They aren’t given enough space to really add complexity. A little blip of a comment on abolition is too much and too little.
2) I found the notes within the book sometimes annoying - I had to remind myself that not everyone knows this information. But I never enjoy it when a story shows its hand too much, makes the message so explicit, feels preachy. The story itself had its moments, too, but overall characters don’t monologue or become the voice of the author. It was a weird experience to have both real statistics about incarceration and fictional backstory in the notes. I enjoyed the fictional ones.
3) Related to the previous point, some characterization was weak. As mentioned, the protesters felt too minimal. But Gunny also comes to mind. I expected his one POV chapter to give me something more interesting than it did.
4) The ending felt a little abrupt. I wanted to sit with it longer, process with the characters.

I saw some reviews saying how the book does a disservice to the fight against current prison practices by creating this fictionally worse situation to focus on. But I think the author’s point is that 1) in many ways it’s not fictionally worse - emphasized with the notes - and 2) we are perhaps not far from accepting such a system. This is also the point of a lot of SF - create a fictional situation that parallels or intensifies a real world one in order to highlight the injustice.