Prisoner's rights

I had to write a reaction paper on something that the ACLU had taken up arms over.  I chose two topics, Internet censorship and prisoner's rights.  I feel like everyone has beat the Internet censorship thing to death over the past couple years, so I'll talk about the rights of prisoners, or lack thereof.

To start off, I want to say that the vast majority of prisoners have committed a crime, broken a law, and are there for a reason.  I believe in the system that we have in place enough to say that the percentage of inmates that we have in the prison system nationwide that are completely and totally innocent of the crime that we have them in there for is pretty low, and the percentage of those who are innocent that got off with something else earlier in their life is pretty high.  They are in there because they made a choice.  Even if they didn't do something and got framed, they were hanging around with the wrong people and got themselves into a situation where they could be held accountable for something illegal that they didn't do.

That said, I think that since they are in prison, they should not have the same rights as someone who abides by the laws that society has put in place.  We used to have a prison system that was very harsh.  It was not a fun place to go.  We did not treat our prisoners very fairly and didn't treat them well.  They were beaten severely for petty offenses, some died because of starvation and disease, etc.  These were problems that we remedied, but then we went and took it a step further.

We started to give them free dental care and health care while they were inside.  Then along with just the basic vocational training courses that they could receive that would help them to assimilate back into society, we started to help to pay for them to get an education.  Those are tax dollars from the American public that are going to make sure that a prisoner has a filling put in because he's in pain.  That money could be spent better elsewhere.  If someone who murdered a family member, friend, coworker, etc. in cold blood doesn't get to have three square meals a day, then I don't know if I would really lose any sleep over it.  Some people that get out of prison can't wait until they are back on the inside because they are being provided with things that they would have to work for to get on the outside.  They don't want to have to work and get an honest job, so they just steal, murder, sell drugs, prostitute themselves and other things so that they can get back into prison and have a simple life again.

When they try to stand up and say that have rights, I say to them: why didn't you think about that before you went and broke the law?  If you are going to violate the rights of those around you and stick your middle finger up to the system that puts laws in place to protect your rights and the rights of the people around you, then why should you still be able to enjoy those rights after you do something like that?

I'm open to hear some arguments, please tweet me @CBMARTIST if you have suggestions for another post or want to debate openly about this topic or something that I've posted before.