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I have empathy for the victims of the gangs; that's why I don't insist that detaining the alleged gang members at all was absolutely unjustifiable. However, once they are in custody, their not being subjected to inhumane conditions does not harm anyone, nor allow them to harm others; the same applies with captured enemy troops, thus the Geneva Conventions.
Which is why one could make the argument that they couldn't afford the normal standards of criminal trials. It does not have any relevance to how people are treated in custody.
The argument is that
They are human beings, made B'tzelem Elohim, and endowed with certain inalienable rights.
If you establish a category of 'people it is justifiable for the State to torture', you create the temptation for others to expand that category to include persons or groups whose existence they have long resented.
Except you miss the fact that jail was not historically able to stop these criminal organizations from operating in ES. The criminals simply controlled parts of the jail and easily communicated with the outside.
These new jails break the ability to communicate with the outside AND serve as strong deterrence (ie don’t want to go to a bad jail don’t be a bad hombre).
Making jail nicer fails on deterrence, fails on incapacitation, and fails on just desert.
Nice jail is fine for things like drunk driving or white collar crime where going to jail at all is terrible for the perp. But for gangs? They need tough hardened jails.
Which could have been done in a more humane manner, much in the way that countries at war are expected to stop captured enemy troops from coordinating with the outside without subjecting them to inhumane conditions.
We have a precedent for 'organisation is trying to harm us; we have members of that organisation in our custody; they are or might be motivated to continue their malicious goals from inside'. We monitor their communications with the outside, set minimum standards for their conditions, and allow the Red Cross access to the facilities to verify that the standards are being upheld.
PoW is just entirely different concept. They aren’t expected to be there for years at a time. There is a reciprocity angle here (we will treat your PoWs nicely if you test ours nicely). Most PoW don’t have significant control over people in the same country nor are the PoWs expected to circumvent their captors in spreading drugs etc in the captor’s country. Also the deterrence angle isn’t really there either (indeed a belligerent might want opponents who are willing to surrender since it reduces the harm their troops are facing).
These situations just aren’t remotely similar.
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