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.Even though he repeatedly had been certified as sane by prison psychologists, Vacaville Prison administrators ordered a lobotomy for him as retribution for his prisoner activism.To escape the lobotomy, Sánchez had to write a letter to the Secret Service, threatening to kill the U.S.president, in order to get charged with a federal crime and thus be “saved” by being sent to federal prison.But while he was incarcerated in federal prisons in Springfield, Missouri, Leavenworth, Kansas, and Marion, Illinois, Sánchez was subjected to the behavior modification regimens that Gómez describes.De Colores reprinted part of Sánchez’s complaints of “inhumane treatment” and legalveConnect - 2011-05-06“torture,” including the forcible administration of the drug Anectine:algratium - PThe first immediate sensation was a tingling sensation all over my body, like when your foot goes to sleep.The next feeling was a heavy feeling on my chest like somebody had dropped a heavy weight on my chest and all the air rushed out of my body.My eyes closed, but I was not asleep.I could not move any part of my body, and I could not breathe at all.I had heard of the drug before, but knew nothing of what to expect.But I did not think it could be anything like what I was experiencing.aiwan eBook ConsorTI thought the doctor had messed up and given me the wrong thing, or maybe too much of the right thing.I thought I was dying.I want to say something, to tell him I couldn’t breathe.But I could not talk or even move or even open my eyes.Then this doctor starts talking to me.He starts talking about knowing what I’m feeling and that it is not pleasant, but it was going to happen to me every time I demonstrated bad behavior in the way of violence.I just wanted some air, not no speech about my behavior.I thought, Oh God, this creep is going to kill me sitting here talking to me when he should be giving me air.Finally after what seemed hours (but was only twoveconnect.com - licensed tominutes) he starts to revive me with air from an oxygen tank.(13).palgraSignificantly, Sánchez’s legal strategy involved multiple approaches that soughtom wwwto expose: (1) de facto criminalization of minority populations; (2) extrajudicial punishment and imprisonment of prisoners; (3) guard use of brutal prison regimens that easily qualify as unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment”; and (4) legally sanctioned and medically supervised uses of torture techniques deemedyright material frillegal by international standards.While the American Civil Liberties Union usedCopSánchez’s testimony in successful lawsuits against the government to end the STARTbehavior modification program, they were never able to save Sánchez from a lifetime of imprisonment.7 (At the time of the publication, Sánchez was facing four life sentences plus seventy additional years of imprisonment for repeatedly assaulting abusive guards and prison officials responsible for administering his torture and a known informer at Leavenworth prison that guards and administrators used against Sánchez as part of their coordinated behavior modification program.)Important for this new era of the U.S.carceral, the De Colores profile on Eddie Sánchez did not invoke an overt appeal to the journal’s cultural nationalist and 10.1057/9780230101470 - Behind Bars, Edited by Suzanne Obolerpal-oboler-18.indd 269pal-oboler-18.indd 2699/9/09 10:56 AM9/9/09 10:56 AM270 B.V.OLGUÍNMarxist discourse that posited all Chicanos as colonial subjects and political prisoners.Rather, the Sánchez profile simultaneously appealed to his civil and human rights, and though the Committee to Free Eddie Sánchez (1976) did not make an explicit call for intervention from international bodies like the United Nations, it deployed a nascent legal vocabulary of human rights even before it had become part of diplomatic discourse.8 Concurrent with the dawn of the human rights movement, De Colores and the Committee to Free Eddie Sánchez presented Sánchez as the quintessential Pinto: a de facto political prisoner due to the violation of national (e.g., the 1787 Eighth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution outlawing“cruel and unusual punishment”) and international standards of prisoner treatment (e.g., 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1957 Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, and 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination), all of which prohibit torture and discrimination.Many other Chicano prisoner rights campaigns made similarveConnect - 2011-05-06discursive appeals that linked prison conditions to a political persecution that wasalgrabroadened to include torture and the violation of human rights, even for those whose incarceration followed normal domestic legal processes.9 Guilt was nottium - Pdenied, or even relativized.Rather, the focus was on brutal prison conditions and torture as a form ofpolitical persecution.Many other campaigns were part of multiracial prisoner rights cases, including the rebellions that Gómez has illuminated.On the surface, these prisoner campaigns may appear to be standard grassroots declamations ofaiwan eBook ConsorTprejudicial policing, prosecution, and government harassment.But in addition to exposing the long history of the racially biased U.S.justice system, their true value today arises from their implicit and overt invocation of international discourses on human rights that transformed virtually all prisoners in the pre-reform (i.e., pre-1980s) U.S.prison system into internationalized domestic prisoners rather than into political prisoners per se.10 These U.S.prisoners were performing what UN and grassroots human rights activists were simultaneously theorizing pursu-veconnect.com - licensed toant to the establishment of international norms and bodies to define and protect.palgrahuman rights!The category of political prisoner in this era anticipated and, in a significantom wwwway, exceeded the possibilities of the new classification model developed in the“Special International Tribunal on the Human Rights Violations of Political Prisoners/POWs in the USA” held in New York in December 1990.The tribunal’s classification sought to expand the use of the term political prisoner by arguing thatyright material fra political prisoner was: (1) someone imprisoned for overtly political activities; orCop(2) someone, including prisoners initially convicted of common crimes, who was subsequently subjected to differential treatment while in prison due to political activism.11 In Pinto and Pinta activism from the 1960s and 1970s era of prison rebellions, there was an appeal to the humanity of all prisoners that simultaneously used—but did not overstate or overinvest—the claim to national minority or colonial status of Pintos and Pintas.This was not an effacement of their racialized identities, especially given that many prisoners—like Black liberation fighters and their allies (e.g., Ruchell Magee and Marilyn Buck), Puerto Rican independentistas, and Chicano nationalists (e.g
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