Alabama treats inmates like Victorian debtors at best, stray animals at worst

[GaussLaw]

This sounds like Angola before the prison reforms instituted by warden Burl Cain (though he's not perfect either). 

I agree that race plays a role, though at least in Louisiana, there are also a lot of white lifers doing hard time. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7Pk2hC3hoM

[GaussLaw]

The American prison system practices amoralist treatment of inmates? No way.

Firstly, amoralist isn't a word, and secondly, even if it were it doesn't refer to what I think you are referring to. Secondly, who are you to judge what is immoral and what isn't. You are merely an individual and from what I can gather not exactly a hugely wealthy or powerful one either. I also recall that you are not religious, thus meaning that you have no Church, no God and no book to back up whatever definition of morality that you are peddling. You are also criticising the morality of the state, yet, again, you have no comparable source of weight to back up your claims to know what it is to be moral.

So, what would you do? The state has to signal its disapproval of the actions of criminals (in a way that is easy for everybody to understand), thus, naturally, prisons must be unpleasant places to be. Far from being a violation or dereliction of duty, these prisons are in fact performing to a tee the role that prisons should perform; that is, to be hard, nasty places of punishment and suffering for the inmates.

Although I wouldn't, myself, go in for withholding medical care from inmates, that is only because I am of the view that they should be farmed out to do hard labour for free, and, you know, crippled criminals aren't likely to perform such tasks particularly well. Nonetheless, I see nothing particularly immoral here, in fact, in my own flawed, worthless individual perspective, I see this treatment as being perfectly morally justifiable.

I certainly don't think prisons should be nice places, but yuck.  Just yuck. 

Prisoners are still humans and citizens too.  While they aren't meant to be pleasant, that doesn't mean that they don't have some tangible value other than for hard labor.  Surely there's a middle ground here.