As Harvey Weinstein faces the prospect of retrial for his overturned convictions and a new trial for an additional sex crimes charge, his attorneys are trying to keep him off of Rikers Island and held at Bellevue Hospital, where he’s been as a result of medical issues, pointing to appalling conditions at the offshore jail. Simultaneously, lawyers for rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs have been fighting unsuccessfully to get him out of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, citing detainee deaths and generally deplorable conditions. Of course, neither Weinstein nor Combs care about the conditions in the jails on principle. These are self-interested actions, seizing on known deficiencies in lockups to try to keep these men from facing the same consequences everyone else in their position would face. They’re not ultimately after a detention, they’re after no detention for themselves. Combs — who is accused of federal crimes including sex trafficking and was denied bail among other things over concerns that he has a history of intimidating witnesses — was not seeking to be moved to a safer lockup but to be allowed to be under house arrest at his extravagant Florida mansion. Both of these men are accused of using their significant wealth and leverage to prey on others, and neither deserves special dispensations. Nonetheless, saying the right things for the wrong reasons doesn’t make those things wrong. Jails and prisons were never intended as five-star hotels, but even within the range of lockups, it’s true that both Rikers and MDC are considered heinous and inhumane places for longtime, well-documented reasons. These facilities have legacies of appalling violence, understaffing, health hazards and so on, to the point that each has been to some extent rebuked by federal judges. Rikers continues to face the prospect of federal receivership after Manhattan Federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain held the city in contempt for failing to work in good faith towards remedying its many unconstitutional shortcomings. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Federal Judge Gary Brown this month threatened to vacate a federal convict’s sentence rather than send him to the dangerous MDC, prompting the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to announce that it would stop sending sentenced detainees there altogether. This came after its sister federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was shut down. This isn’t a standard state of affairs, nor is it acceptable. Our values should not permit inhumane conditions for anyone in New York City, regardless of what they’ve been accused of or sentenced for having done. Weinstein and Combs are not the best interlocutors for this message, but elected judges, elected officials, advocates and journalists have been saying the same and should keep pressing the issue. These facilities as they currently exist are simply not fit for human habitation of any kind, barring significant changes. We cannot let people off the hook for their offenses, but it is not reasonable to send them to places where their health, safety and life will be at an unreasonable level of risk. Mitigate the risks on Rikers — ideally via a receiver who can succeed where successive city administrations have failed — and MDC, so people like Weinstein and Combs won’t have any leg to stand on trying to wriggle away.