Well if (I assume) you're coming from the mindset of how US prisons treat their inmates, expecting prisoners to be treated with any kind of humanity at all would certainly seem rediculous.
Heres a short program that the Finnish Broadcasting company did with an American visiting Nordic prisons/correctional institues, just to show a different thinking. Punishment or Rehabilitation.
http://arenan.yle.fi/tv/2428667
As a former minimum security inmate, you couldn't be more wrong. Security status has nothing to do with treatment. Just from your comment, I know that you've never so much as been detained.
Prison is a lot better than county detention; in prison, there is a loose respect structure between COs and inmates (you live there, they don't). In county, inmates are dehumanized beyond nothing as a form of control and a mechanism to encourage plea bargains. It happened to me when I spent four months in county: "just accept this plea deal and you can go home," and when I refused I got "lost" in the system on the way back to jail. For 48 hours or more (I lost track). With no food or bathroom facilities. Twice.
All pretrial detention comes with a deadline, for the most part (beyond which you must be sentenced or released), and another tactic they use is to get you to "waive" that time so they can "better investigate your case," they say. One dumb individual I spent time with accepted this offer and had spent nine years in county jail without a sentence. I'm not making this up.
I became a much more cynical person during that experience and hate when I see people defending that system in any way. Whatever you think you know about our detention system, you don't. Whatever you think you know about minimum, you don't, too, and I have several scars to show you if you don't believe me.
> Most of the inmates in our prison system are treated "with humanity."
This is not true whatsoever. Fundamentally, if the system that feeds prisons treated people with humanity, a large number of people would never be prisoners in the first place.