"I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking to be treated as a person -- with attention, dignity, and the care any human deserves when in distress. What I have experienced looks less like institutional safety and more like a system that has allowed indifference to calcify into policy. Procedures matter only when they protect people; otherwise they become instruments of neglect. Since arriving in the SHU, I've been stripped of almost everything that helped me weather this chapter. Phone calls with loved ones have been cut off. Emails to family have been blocked. Visits -- rare, sacred windows when a person can feel human again -- have been taken away, twice a month and on holidays, as if punishment were protection. I sometimes feel the life leaving my body, a slow leaking of hope." -- former Republican Congressman George Santos