Safe Drinking Water Is a Basic Human Right That Texas Prisons Fail to Respect

In the US, prisons are so bad that a sensible jury should almost never find anyone guilty for a crime that is not a violent crime. Prison is a meaningful reduction in one's residual life expectancy due to extremely poor medical care, gang violence, poor nutrition, bad temperature control, legal slave labor, inability to freely read books, and now toxic water.

This kind of story seems to be very common for all kinds of US prisons or detention facilities. The most prominent one right now probably the ones from ICE. Like this story about the ICE prison for children (https://www.propublica.org/article/life-inside-ice-dilley-ch...)

> Moms told me that their kids had lost their appetites after finding worms and mold on their food, had trouble sleeping on the facility’s hard metal bunk beds in rooms shared by at least a dozen other people, and were constantly sick.

Of course inmates should have decent drinking water.

But I strongly disagree with "human rights" that are defined this way - something someone has to go out and bring to you.

A human right is something that someone cannot take away from me. Free speech is a human right. The right to life.

A "human right to water" combined with a "human right to housing" implies that if I walk aimlessly into a desert and decide to stay there, it is my human right to have people bring we water and a place to stay. Other people not doing so is against my human rights.

That's just... dumb.

And, again - inmates should have clean water.

When do we become good enough at something that it becomes a basic human right? The libertarian counter-argument to this would be, this is only true if someone else doesn’t have to provide the clean drinking water. If drinking water in that part of Texas is naturally unsafe, then, someone has to volunteer to provide it, or people have to do it themselves.

People use a similar argument in medicine, and I think the counter-counter argument to that is, I dunno the statistic is but like I think many doctors get into medicine hoping to help people that can’t help themselves. Medicine is ubiquitous enough, and public opinion probably leans that way enough to build some conception of a human right around it.

We produce more food than we can consume, that and its relation to human flourishing mean I think providing food is a human right.