"Barbaric" Mississippi Prison

Those of us who live in America have been brought up being told that we do not condone cruel and unusual punishment.  Those us you raised as Christians were taught  "For he who is least among you all is the one who is great."  Yet we also live in a nation in which inmates are treated like animals and the mentally ill are abused for enjoyment.  Reuters released an article yesterday depicting the extremely sad state of affairs in one Mississippi prison for the mentally ill as such:  

A Mississippi prison for severely mentally ill inmates is infested with rats that prisoners sell to one another as pets, two civil liberties groups claimed in a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.

Inmates at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility near Meridian live under "barbaric" conditions, in filthy quarters without working lights or toilets, forcing them to defecate on Styrofoam trays or into trash bags, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed in the lawsuit.

Beatings, rape, robbery and riots are commonplace, and inmates are denied access to medication and psychiatric care, the 83-page complaint stated.

The privately run prison "is an extremely dangerous facility operating in a perpetual state of crisis" and inmates' human rights are violated daily, according to the groups. Some prisoners set fires in a desperate attempt to get medical attention in emergencies, the lawsuit said.

Later on in the article they reveal this disturbing tidbit:

In one instance, according to the lawsuit, an otherwise healthy inmate had to have a testicle removed after prison officials repeatedly denied his request for medical help when it swelled to the size of a softball from cancer.

How is this allowed?  How is this not considered cruel and unusual?  Who in the world has the lack of moral incentive to just allow this to continue under their directive?  Is this about saving money or just about demeaning people?  And when are we going to stand up and stop this craziness?  It's not your relative, yet, so there is no reason to speak out about it.  To me though these actions should not be perpetrated against anyone.  It does not mater what their crime was, we are supposedly a civilized society, civilized people do not punish others by making them live in their own filth and suffer from ailments that could be easily treated.