Explore the real-world places that appear in Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Angola State Penitentiary (CAPE Origin Site), The Grand Arena (Primary CAPE Venue), Protest Encampment Outside the Arena, CAPE Corporate Headquarters, Sing Sing Correctional Facility and 8 more.
Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, LA — Model for CAPE's founding infrastructure
The novel's CAPE system is rooted in the real history of American prison labor and spectacle. Angola-style prison farms — where prisoners have historically labored for no pay on former plantation land — serve as the ideological and geographic blueprint for the Chain-Gang network. The novel's footnotes draw explicit lines between real penal history and the dystopian CAPE program, grounding the horror in documented American practice.
Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, built on land that was once a plantation. Prisoners have historically performed agricultural labor there, and it hosts the Angola Prison Rodeo — a real spectacle event that critics have compared to gladiatorial entertainment.
Angola remains an active maximum-security prison housing over 5,000 inmates. The Angola Prison Rodeo continues to be held twice yearly and is open to the public, drawing thousands of visitors — a real-world parallel Adjei-Brenyah references in the novel's critique.
Visit: Angola Prison Museum (museum)
Atlanta Metro Region, GA — Largest CAPE death-match stadium
The Grand Arena is where Loretta Thurwar and Hamara 'Hurricane Staxxx' Stacker perform before roaring crowds, their chain-gang battles broadcast nationally. Thurwar wields her lethal hammer — a weapon she has named — against opponents while tens of thousands of fans cheer. The arena scenes are among the novel's most visceral: corporate sponsors' logos ring the scoreboard, cheerful announcers narrate kills, and Thurwar carries the knowledge that she is only a few matches away from freedom, a fact that makes every swing heavier.
Atlanta has long been a hub of the American entertainment and sports industry, home to the Mercedes-Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena. The city also sits at the heart of the American South's history of racial labor exploitation and mass incarceration, making it a resonant setting for Adjei-Brenyah's dystopia.
Atlanta's sports and entertainment complex continues to expand. Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United, opened in 2017 and represents the kind of corporate-branded entertainment spectacle the novel skewers.
Visit: Mercedes-Benz Stadium (landmark)
Outside CAPE stadium gates, Atlanta, GA — Anti-CAPE demonstrators
Advocates and activists gather outside every CAPE arena, holding signs and organizing marches against the system's legalized murder. The novel follows several protesters whose chapters intercut with the arena action — ordinary people who are horrified by CAPE but struggle to be heard over the roar of the crowd inside. Their presence underscores the novel's central irony: that righteous protest exists alongside, but cannot stop, the spectacle it opposes. One key protester arc involves a young woman grappling with whether to escalate her tactics.
Atlanta has been a historic center of American civil rights protest, from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's founding to the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations. The city's Centennial Olympic Park and surrounding streets have repeatedly served as gathering points for mass protest movements.
Atlanta's downtown protest culture remains active. The area around major stadiums frequently hosts organized demonstrations during high-profile events. The city's civil rights legacy is preserved through the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park nearby.
Visit: Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park (historic site)
Midtown Manhattan, New York, NY — Criminal Action Penal Entertainment nerve center
CAPE's corporate owners operate from a gleaming office tower where executives monitor ratings, negotiate sponsor deals, and strategize against any threat to their profitable system. When Thurwar's approaching freedom threatens the program's star power — and thus its revenue — CAPE's leadership orchestrates obstacles designed to derail or destroy her path to release. The executives speak in the sanitized language of entertainment business while making decisions that cost prisoners their lives, a juxtaposition the novel uses to savage effect.
Midtown Manhattan has been the center of American corporate media and entertainment since the rise of broadcast television. The concentration of private equity firms, media conglomerates, and prison industry investors in this district reflects real patterns of capital accumulation in American mass incarceration.
The private prison industry — dominated by companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group — maintains extensive corporate and lobbying presences in New York and Washington. Private prison companies are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, steps from Midtown's office towers.
354 Hunter St, Ossining, NY — Real prison echoed in CAPE's Northeast Links
The novel's northeastern Chain-Gang Links are partly modeled on the dense network of New York State prisons that warehouse enormous numbers of incarcerated people, disproportionately Black and brown. Sing Sing's history of spectacle — it once allowed public executions — mirrors CAPE's logic of turning punishment into entertainment. Adjei-Brenyah's footnotes reference the real statistics of New York's prison population as counterpoint to the fictional CAPE.
Sing Sing, built in 1826 by prison labor on the Hudson River, was for decades the site of New York's electric chair executions. Its name became synonymous with American incarceration. Public execution was once a feature of the American justice system, a history the novel draws on directly.
Sing Sing remains an active medium-security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections. The Sing Sing Prison Museum, opened in 2022 in Ossining, now offers public history exhibits about the facility and the American carceral system.
Visit: Sing Sing Prison Museum (museum)
South Side Chicago, IL — Where Thurwar's life before incarceration is rooted
The novel reveals Thurwar's life before CAPE through fragmented flashbacks — her neighborhood, her choices, the crime that put her in the system. Her backstory is depicted with empathy and complexity: she is neither purely victim nor purely villain, but a full human being whose path into incarceration reflects systemic inequities. These passages humanize her in deliberate contrast to the dehumanizing spectacle CAPE makes of her body and violence.
Chicago's South Side has been shaped by decades of disinvestment, racially discriminatory housing policy, and over-policing — structural forces that have contributed to disproportionate rates of incarceration among Black residents. The neighborhood is also home to vibrant communities, culture, and organizing traditions.
The South Side of Chicago remains a community of immense cultural richness alongside ongoing challenges of poverty and gun violence. Organizations like the Chicago Community Bond Fund and Assata's Daughters continue to do abolition and mutual aid work there.
Houston's Third Ward, TX — Staxxx's roots and pre-incarceration life
Staxxx's character is grounded in a specific geography of Black Southern life. Her charisma and ferocity in the arena are shown to have roots in a life lived before the system reduced her to entertainment. The novel explores her relationship with Thurwar — their love is one of the book's most tender threads — and how that love becomes both survival strategy and the most fully human thing left to them inside a system designed to strip away humanity.
Houston's Third Ward is one of the historically Black neighborhoods established during segregation, home to Texas Southern University and a deep tradition of community organizing and Black cultural production. Like many such neighborhoods, it has faced systematic disinvestment and gentrification pressure.
The Third Ward remains a vital center of Black Houston life. Emancipation Park, established in 1872 by freed Black Houstonians to celebrate Juneteenth, was fully renovated in 2016 and stands as a landmark of Black freedom struggle.
Visit: Emancipation Park (park)
Rural Mississippi Delta region — Where Links are conditioned for combat
Before Links appear in arenas, they are processed and conditioned at CAPE facilities that blend prison brutality with sports training regimens. The novel depicts this dehumanizing preparation — the stripping of names, the assignment of weapons, the psychological conditioning — as a distillation of what prison already does to people, simply made visible and marketed. Guards and handlers operate with the casual cruelty of people who have been told their charges are already less than human.
The Mississippi Delta's plantation economy transitioned almost seamlessly into prison farm labor after the Civil War through convict leasing and the Black Codes. Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary), established in 1901, operated explicitly as a plantation worked by prisoners, many of whom were Black men arrested on pretextual charges.
Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman continues to operate and has faced federal scrutiny for dangerous and inhumane conditions. Multiple prisoners died during a 2019–2020 crisis, prompting Department of Justice investigations into the facility.
Washington, D.C. — Anti-CAPE national advocacy demonstration
The novel includes scenes of organized national protest against CAPE, including demonstrations in the nation's capital aimed at legislators who have enabled or refused to ban the program. Advocates carry photos of Links who have been killed in the arenas — treating them as victims of state violence, not entertainers. These scenes parallel the protest chapters set at individual arenas, building a picture of a resistance movement that is morally clear but politically outmatched by CAPE's corporate influence.
The National Mall has been the site of America's most significant mass demonstrations, from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to the 2017 Women's March. It functions in American political imagination as the legitimate theater of democratic protest.
The National Mall remains freely accessible as a public gathering space managed by the National Park Service. It continues to host major demonstrations, memorials, and civic events year-round.
Visit: National Mall (park)
Bristol, Connecticut — ESPN-analog network that airs CAPE matches
The novel includes the perspective of CAPE media employees — commentators, producers, and technicians — who package the death matches as sports entertainment for mass consumption. Their chapters are among the book's most chilling: ordinary people who frame Thurwar's survival and her opponents' deaths with the same language used for touchdowns and slam dunks. The broadcast apparatus normalizes the violence and sells advertising against it, implicating the audience in its perpetuation.
Bristol, Connecticut is home to ESPN's global headquarters, which since the 1970s has shaped how Americans consume sports as narrative spectacle. The blending of journalism, entertainment, and commerce in sports media has been extensively critiqued by scholars of American culture.
ESPN's Bristol campus remains one of the largest sports media operations in the world, employing thousands and broadcasting to over 200 countries. The campus is not open to public tours but is a well-known landmark in the sports media industry.
Washington, D.C. — Anti-CAPE nonprofit working to end the program
The novel gives significant space to the advocacy organizations attempting to legally and politically dismantle CAPE. Lawyers, organizers, and formerly incarcerated people work from cramped offices to build cases against the program, lobby legislators, and support the families of Links. Their chapters are characterized by exhaustion and moral clarity: they know exactly what is happening and cannot stop it fast enough. Their frustration mirrors the reader's, and their humanity is the novel's moral counterweight to CAPE's corporate logic.
Washington, D.C. hosts hundreds of civil rights, criminal justice reform, and prison abolition organizations, including the ACLU National Prison Project, the Sentencing Project, and the Equal Justice Initiative's advocacy arm. These groups have fought against mass incarceration, private prisons, and the death penalty for decades.
Criminal justice reform advocacy is among the most active nonprofit sectors in Washington. Organizations like the Justice Policy Institute and Worth Rises continue to campaign specifically against private prison industry influence on legislation.
Alabama & Georgia rural counties — Smaller CAPE venues on the circuit
The Chain-Gang circuit moves through smaller rural arenas before building to major metropolitan venues. These smaller stops are depicted as rawer, more intimate with their violence — audiences closer to the action, the class desperation of impoverished communities seeking cheap entertainment more visible. Thurwar and Staxxx move through these venues as a unit, protecting their fellow Links where they can, watching the system grind others down. The rural circuit underscores that CAPE is not just an urban spectacle but a nationwide institution.
Alabama and rural Georgia counties were central to convict leasing — the post-Civil War system by which states leased Black prisoners to private corporations for labor, effectively recreating slavery. This history is the direct ancestor of the prison-industrial complex Adjei-Brenyah fictionalizes.
Alabama has the highest per-capita prison incarceration rate in the United States and has faced federal intervention over deadly prison conditions. The state's prisons have been described by federal investigators as plagued by violence, understaffing, and inhumane conditions.
417 Caroline St, Montgomery, AL — Real monument to racial terror and incarceration
While not a location in the novel itself, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery exists as the real-world moral anchor for everything Adjei-Brenyah's book argues. The novel's documentary footnotes and its insistence on naming the real statistics of American incarceration point readers toward exactly this kind of reckoning. The memorial's columns bearing the names of lynching victims rhyme structurally with the novel's own lists of the dead — both insisting that names and numbers must not be abstracted into mere data.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in 2018 and designed by MASS Design Group for Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, is the nation's first memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching. It documents over 4,000 racial terror lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950.
The memorial and its companion Legacy Museum are open to the public in Montgomery, Alabama. They have become essential destinations for Americans reckoning with the history of racial violence and its connection to contemporary mass incarceration — the exact lineage Adjei-Brenyah's novel traces.
Visit: National Memorial for Peace and Justice (monument)
More by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: All Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah books
Other nearby maps: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg locations map