Since its closure in 1963, Alcatraz Jail has develop into the stuff of legend. The seemingly inescapable federal penitentiary on a California island surrounded by frigid and highly effective currents gained notoriety for housing a few of historical past’s most well-known prisoners, from Al “Scarface” Capone to George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
However now, many years for the reason that island was bought by the Nationwide Park Service and became a well-liked vacationer vacation spot, Donald Trump desires to transform it again into a jail.
What Trump stated about Alcatraz
“REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!” the President posted on Fact Social on Sunday night, asserting that he has directed the Bureau of Prisons, the Division of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Homeland Safety to “reopen a considerably enlarged and rebuilt” jail on Alcatraz Island to “home America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
The transfer comes as Trump has pursued extra aggressively punitive policies in his second time period, together with signing orders that encourage using excessive sentences and the demise penalty, that target incarcerated trans ladies, and that expand police powers. Trump has additionally been criticized for eschewing the rule of law in finishing up a mass deportation campaign, detaining and deporting each undocumented immigrants in addition to folks legally within the U.S. without due process. At an April assembly between Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump said he’d be “all for” deporting Individuals to El Salvador subsequent. In January, Trump ordered the opening of a detention middle in Guantanamo Bay, the place the U.S. has lengthy leased a website from Cuba, to which his Administration would ship the “worst legal aliens.”
Learn Extra: Trump Set to Ratchet Up His Immigration Crackdown During Next 100 Days
“Once we had been a extra critical Nation, in instances previous, we didn’t hesitate to lock up essentially the most harmful criminals, and maintain them far-off from anybody they might hurt. That’s the way in which it’s presupposed to be,” Trump added in his Fact Social publish. “We are going to not be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges which are afraid to do their job and permit us to take away criminals, who got here into our Nation illegally.”
Trump told reporters on Sunday evening whereas returning to the White Home from Florida that his Alcatraz plan was “simply an concept I’ve had” to counter the “radicalized judges [that] need to have trials for each single—consider it—each single individual that’s in our nation illegally.” Alcatraz is “an emblem of legislation and order,” he stated. “It’s obtained fairly a historical past, frankly.”
Specialists, nonetheless, say Trump misunderstands the historical past and performance of Alcatraz.
“So lots of his insurance policies sound good—not less than to these with the identical politics—so long as you don’t take into consideration them too significantly,” Ashley Rubin, an affiliate professor within the Sociology Division on the College of Hawai’i at Mānoa, tells TIME. “Should you do, you understand all the sensible issues and holes within the reasoning and the way if we really do this stuff, it should simply make us worse off. Reopening Alcatraz is like that. It will be a lot safer for Individuals and punitive towards criminals to make use of our present jail system than to reopen a vacationer attraction.”
The historical past of Alcatraz and why it closed
Lengthy earlier than Alcatraz grew to become the location of a jail, it was a navy fortress. Initially the land of the Ohlone folks indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Space, the island was named La Isla de las Alcatraces after its giant pelicans {that a} Spanish Navy officer who arrived in 1775 thought had been gannets, known as alactraces in Spanish. Later, the island grew to become a U.S. naval protection fort after the Mexican-American Conflict of 1848. The U.S. navy additionally used the island to carry prisoners, together with accomplice sympathizers throughout the Civil Conflict and Hopi Native Individuals who resisted the federal government’s land decrees and necessary teaching programs in 1895. By 1912, it was rebuilt as an official navy jail.
In 1933, the Justice Division took over the island and made it a maximum-security federal penitentiary, partly in response to an increase in organized crime throughout prohibition. If the encircling circumstances didn’t make escape a tough sufficient prospect, the jail was retrofitted so that every prisoner was stored to at least one cell, and one guard was on obligation for each three prisoners. Thirty-six males tried 14 completely different escapes over the 29 years that the jail was open, and practically all had been caught or died within the try.
However the jail closed in March 1963. Its amenities had been crumbling and would have price $3 to $5 million to revive, and its remoted location made working prices too costly to take care of—practically three times higher than every other federal jail, based on the Bureau of Prisons—as a result of every part, together with potable water, needed to be shipped in.
The jail has lengthy been a website of public fascination. It was featured within the 1962 movie Birdman of Alcatraz about Robert Stroud, a convicted felon who studied the birds he noticed whereas incarcerated and have become an ornithologist, even discovering a treatment to a standard avian hemorrhagic illness. It was additionally featured within the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood, and primarily based on the real-life 1962 tried escape of three prisoners who had been by no means discovered, in addition to within the 1996 fictional motion thriller The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
After its buy by the NPS in 1972, the island has develop into a significant vacationer attraction and brings in additional than 1,000,000 guests every year, based on the company.
How the Bureau of Prisons and others have responded—and what consultants inform TIME of Trump’s proposal
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons told the Related Press that the BOP will “adjust to all Presidential Orders,” however didn’t clarify how it might restore or reopen the jail whereas it’s underneath the jurisdiction of the NPS, whose workers and funding have been threatened by Trump cuts, significantly whereas the BOP is struggling to maintain its personal amenities open amid deteriorating infrastructure and staffing shortages.
“The President’s proposal just isn’t a critical one,” former Home Speaker and California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi posted on X.
David Ward, professor emeritus of sociology on the College of Minnesota who interviewed and wrote about prisoners at Alcatraz, tells TIME that there’s little sensible use to attempt to reopen Alcatraz as a jail, however Trump could also be extra curious about its title and legacy than practicality.
“The reopening of ALCATRAZ will function an emblem of Regulation, Order, and JUSTICE,” Trump stated in his Fact Social announcement.
Rubin says that even traditionally, Alcatraz was not essentially the most environment friendly or most punitive maximum-security jail. Fairly, it served extra as a “public relations piece” and “administrative salve.” For one, its capability is restricted by the island’s dimension. When the jail was functioning, it may maintain at most round 300 folks—or as much as about 1,000 if overcrowded.
And whereas it was billed to carry “the worst of the worst,” in actuality, says Rubin, it held only a handful of infamous criminals together with some prisoners who had beforehand managed to flee or who had been “troublesome” at different prisons: “Folks like to speak concerning the Hannibal Lecters of the world, however they normally don’t find yourself in most of these amenities. It’s normally people who find themselves only a thorn within the facet of directors.”
If the BOP had been to go forward with rebuilding Alcatraz, nonetheless, the previous jail facility is considerably deteriorated and must be solely rebuilt, Rubin says, which might doubtless take years and will transcend Trump’s time period. One other chance, Rubin suggests, could be for Alcatraz to develop into a “fast turnover facility,” the place the Administration would possibly ship folks with out due course of earlier than deporting them, by which case it might largely function a “photo-op” for Trump.
“The publicity of Alcatraz Island is what [Trump] desires: a bastion the place inmates are handled inhumanely as a result of they deserve it,” says Ward. It’s a “monument to punishment and brutality.”
Given the challenges restoring the island jail presents, Trump may even pursue his aim of “reopening” Alcatraz by transplanting the title elsewhere, akin to El Salvador. It wouldn’t be the primary time it’s been completed: After Alcatraz closed, it was succeeded by two supermax prisons: “New Alcatraz” in Marion, Illinois, and the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado. “The title Alcatraz all the time goes with the prisons as a result of it conveys the message the federal government likes to have,” says Ward, “which is, ‘we’re doing actual punishment for the dangerous guys.’”
