I really wanted to love this and I was grabbed hard by the first chapter but it's all downhill from there. The writing isn't particularly good and the plot doesn't really go anywhere. It's disjointed and bloated, focusing on characters who aren't at all important and weirdly still introducing new point of view characters three quarters of the way through the book. Even the main characters aren't particularly likeable and there isn't really much that separates them, and I found myself with no real attachment to them. 

There are definitely important themes here and it's good to see a novel that tackles the prison abolition movement so seriously, but I wish the author had been confident enough to either allow some subtext to remain subtext or else to fill the regular footnotes with more than just a surface level of information. As it is they often detract from the novel rather than adding to it.