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“President Donald Trump said on Sunday he was directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to rebuild and reopen the infamous Alcatraz prison in the San Francisco Bay to ‘house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.’… The federal prison at Alcatraz housed notorious U.S. criminals such as Al Capone before it closed in 1963. It is now one of San Francisco's most popular tourist destinations.” Reuters
Both sides are skeptical of reopening Alcatraz:
“Alcatraz cost a fortune to operate. Harsh conditions — wind, surf and salt — shortened the lifespans of buildings and equipment. As the Depression ended and the Bay Area boomed, labor costs for guards and other staffers rose steeply. Virtually everything the prisoners and their keepers needed had to be ferried to the island on boats and barges — including nearly a million gallons of water per week, tons of food and fuel for the generators…
“A scant 25 years after Alcatraz opened, the feds began hatching plans to close it. Prisoners were just as secure at a federal prison in Atlanta for one-third of the cost, a study concluded… Trump might be reassured to know that the government already has a lockup far more secure, remote and intimidating than Alcatraz ever was: the ‘super-max’ prison near Florence, Colorado… In more than 30 years of operation, no one has come close to escaping.”
David Von Drehle, Washington Post
“As with many of Trump’s provocative plans, especially the ones he announces in all caps on social media, it’s difficult to know if the president is serious or not… To make the prison operable would require a massive amount of money; there’s no access to outside power lines or clean water on the island, facilities have deteriorated from time and saltwater damage, and weather conditions around the island make large-scale renovations difficult…
“Sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into an Alcatraz renovation project instead of expanding or improving maximum security prisons that already exist is impractical (and unlikely). Proposing such an idea is a pointless distraction from Trump’s so-far-successful effort to deport rapists and murderers.”
Haley Strack, National Review
Other opinions below.
“Sometimes, Trump’s dumb proposals are based in some not entirely unreasonable idea. For example, American leaders have wanted to exert greater control over Greenland for years; they just stopped short of threatening an imperialistic takeover. This is not one of those situations. Before Sunday, no one was talking about reopening Alcatraz…
“Reopening Alcatraz would clearly be absurdly expensive and logistically difficult. In addition to addressing the issues that led to the prison being closed in the first place, the Trump administration would have to figure out how to secure congressional funding, shut down a popular tourist site, transfer control from the National Park Service back to the Bureau of Prisons, and build a new and improved prison complex on the island.”
Margaret Hartmann, New York Magazine
“This interest in Alcatraz is peak Trump in that its symbolic power far outweighs its literal capacity to significantly change anything about American law and order. Alcatraz’s average prison population was less than 300 inmates when it was in service; even an expanded facility couldn’t fit that many more people onto the remote island…
“The impracticality of Alcatraz is beside the point for our reality television star president. Like sending undocumented migrants to a vicious mega-prison in El Salvador, the point is the optics of dominating people deemed to be deviants. Mass incarceration and dangerously powerful police forces aren’t sufficient for Trump. He wants to do something spectacular and dramatic to induce an atmosphere of even more fear and cruelty.”
Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC
“It’s not as though we don’t have fearsome prisons anymore: The ADX Florence, or the super-max in Florence, Colo., is known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies for a reason. Inmates are isolated and the security measures are harrowingly robust, coming as close to total control as is humanly possible. The drug kingpin El Chapo is held there, and he’s never getting out…
“If we don’t need a showy new name-brand prison to demonstrate to offenders that we mean business, we do need more jail space. Counter to the misguided contentions of the decarceration movement, the best way to protect society from criminals is to imprison them… We should be building new prisons that are modern, and ideally, relatively small. This creates more humane conditions, and allows for authorities to experiment with what prison settings and policies work best.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
Some suggest, “Instead of just reopening the Alcatraz prison facility, [build] a giant Statue of Justice on the island… If the East Coast has a Statue of Liberty, then it only makes sense for the West Coast to have a corresponding Statue of Justice to recognize that from sea to shining sea, we desire liberty and justice for all…
“We are coming out of a dark half decade in which the country was trapped in a malaise, when abolishing the police was taken as a serious policy idea by the party in power, and in which elite institutions soaked up taxpayer money while spitting on the cultural and political heritage of the United States. We shouldn’t just look at the empty pedestals around the country and shrug. Go on offense. Declare boldly what America was and will be again.”
Jarrett Stepman, Daily Signal
