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> How is admittedly imprisoning someone for "coercive" reasons not cruel?

All imprisonment is an attempt to constrain undesired and incentivize desired behavior by imposing unacceptable costs for non-compliance (in fact, so is all law); it is inherently coercive.

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Sure. Expand my question then to imprisoning someone to coerce testimony.

It is no more cruel than punitive imprisonment in similar conditions and I think it is undeniable that it is not within any meaning of cruel (even, given current values, one relative to changing cultural values rather than fixed in scope at the time written) that could plausibly be argued to be intended as the meaning of the 8th Amendment.

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