Dehumanisation. Once a criminal and in prison, you have no rights. Even afterwards. It is an absolute shitshow.

The circumstances under which Human Rights can be legitimately curtailed are interesting. The conventions generally distinguishes between some rights like freedom from torture as absolute, while others such as various freedoms can be legitimately curtailed to balance the needs of society.

Access to books would fall under the right to education, but I'm not sure if that's a right recognised under the US constitution and the US is not meaningfully or blindingly subscribed to any international treaties on human rights.

Convince most Americans that prisoners deserve anything but punishment.

Convincing a simple majority of Americans isn't that difficult, but legislators are a different story.

The circumstances under which Human Rights can be legitimately curtailed are interesting. The conventions generally distinguishes between some rights like freedom from torture as absolute, while others such as various freedoms can be legitimately curtailed to balance the needs of society.

Access to books would fall under the right to education, but I'm not sure if that's a right recognised under the US constitution and the US is not meaningfully subscribed to any international treaties on human rights.

How can reading books be a human right when humans went 190,000 years without writing? Was every pre-literate culture violating a human right?

Prisons are a recent invention. Ancient punishments were execution, banishment, enslavement or mutilation.

Since people go insane with lack of stimulation in solitary, I'd say stimulation is indeed a basic human right.

Does that include all forms of stimulation, or do the jailers get to pick which kind? Are all needs rights? If so, is a famine an excuse for a human rights violation (implying that there are circumstantial excuses for violating human rights), or are people living in poor countries forced to be human rights violators?

You can pick anything you want, and say people should have it, but if you want to say there are no excuses for human rights violations then you can't pick anything you want and call it a right.

On the other hand, if you want it to be widely accepted that there are excuses for human rights violations, then it's strongly in your interest to have as many rights as possible. Didn't Saudi Arabia, notorious rights violator, want internet to be declared a right?

My definition of a human right is human rights are inalienable, and they do not require someone else to provide it. The purpose of government is to protect those rights. (As written in the Declaration of Independence.)

The point of jail is to protect society from people who violate other peoples' rights. Jail shouldn't be about punishment, torture, etc.

It's well known that removing stimulation from people causes them to go insane. Hence, such is tantamount from torture. While that isn't specifically about book reading, preventing a person from reading, human contact, etc., is removing stimulation. Removing all stimulation violates human rights.

That logic doesn’t really hold up. Would you make that same argument about modern medicine?

What's your definition of a human right, anything that a first-world citizen wants to have, or an inalienable "property" of right and wrong? If it's the first, then there's nothing wrong with a third world dictator that doesn't feel they have the luxury of allowing rights. If it's the second, then you can't have all of these positive rights.