^aUniversity of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX

Abstract

This essay examines past and ongoing models of prisoner activism and advocacy in order to recuperate and redeploy earlier Chicana/o prisoner invocations of human rights discourses. I show how the War on Crime has converged with the War on Terror through the deliberate subversions of international treaties and protocols to which the US is a signatory. This convergence ultimately demands and enables recourse to human rights regimes. I thus propose a relocation of US prison work onto an international sphere, through the use of human rights discourses and strategies.