They are "victims of brutal and inhumane treatment." If you've read the details of their incarceration, you can't call it anything else than brutal and inhumane.

From an article in The Daily Mail::

Each one has 32 cells of about 100 square meters (1,075 square feet), designed to hold 'more than 100' inmates, according to Public Works Minister Romeo Rodriguez. [So, about 1 square meter -- just over a square yard -- per inmate]

Each cell has only two sinks and two toilets.

There are only 80 metal bunks for every 100 prisoners, and rights groups and observers have criticised the construction as a violation of incarceration standards.

'There will be no mattresses in the cells,' the prison warden - who wore a ski mask to protect his identity - told journalists when the project was unveiled.

While the prison is equipped with dining halls, exercise rooms and table tennis tables, they are exclusively for guards' use.

Prisoners will leave the cell only for legal hearings by videoconference, or to be punished in a windowless and unlit isolation cell.

The strategy of mass-arresting gang members and incarcerating them is by all reports doing a great job of saving El Salvador from rampant gang violence and murder. I'm all for that.

But the conditions under which the prisoners are being kept are cruel almost beyond belief. Yes, the gangs themselves are cruel beyond belief, but they could be just as securely detained under conditions that wouldn't cause international outrage (which is coming, if the situation is as described) and cause violence and disease among the prison population, which are ALSO coming.