Breaking the law doesn't remove your basic fundamental human rights.
That said though, the real issue is how bad can you make the conditions in a prison?
There's a slippery slope problem here because once you start making allowances for poor treatment of prisoners, you start opening the doors to more allowances "Why can X prison do Y thing to prisoners, but we can't do Z other thing that's just as bad or not even as bad", etc.
Yeah I phrased that badly, I meant to say they should lose their human rights. For doing something like that, I really don't think he deserve any rights as a person.
Anyways, as far as it goes for prisoners at the moment its pretty damn stupid. I'm not too sure what the situation in the US with prisons, but in the UK its pretty bad. It costs a fortune in taxes and we're running out of prison space etc. I understand obviously the a lot of money has to go into detaining people, but they live like they're in a hotel or something.
It's at the point now where people who have already been in prison break the law again for the purpose of getting into prison. If they were put into solitary confinement for their sentence it wouldn't cost nearly as much money, people wouldn't go in again and it'd remove problems such as drug circulation inside.
Just to show how bad the situation is here, I'm gonna throw in a quick story. I'm not sure to what extent this is true (you never can be sure with tabloids x.x) but there was apparently a situation in the UK when a Muslim prisoner (someone who was in prison on terrorism charges) kicked off a shitstorm when he was made to eat ham sandwiches, and started trying to campaign etc.
I really don't think someone who conspired to kill thousands of people should have the right to live, never mind to choose what fillings he has in his sandwich.
It might be a bit of an extreme situation, but its the same kind of concept.