President Trump said he is ordering federal agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz. “I am directing the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security to reopen and enlarge, and rebuild Alcatraz to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders,” he said ina social media post. The historic former US penitentiary Alcatraz opened in 1934 and is widely known as the rock that housed some of the world’s most dangerous inmates to date, including infamous mobster Al Capone.
When asked for a comment, Trump did not provide details on when he plans to reopen Alcatraz. Trump replied, “No one has ever escaped from Alcatraz.” Enacting Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz would come at a steep cost, though, and operating a prison on an island whose most plentiful natural material is sandstone. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Alcatraz was closed because it was too expensive to run.
At its time, it was nearly 3 times more expensive to run than a normal prison. This isolation meant that food, water, and fuel had to be brought by boat. If the Trump administration tried to rebuild a prison on the island, it would need to solve long-running infrastructure challenges, but also water and sewage were dumped into the bay when hundreds of inmates and staff lived on the island, so that’s another issue. But there is more where that came from, such as in movies, Alcatraz gained a mythical air, it was depicted as being full of the country’s most dangerous inmates, offering harsh conditions and virtually no hope of escape the reality is for one thing Alcatraz was pretty small averaging around 260 to 275 inmates. According to the prison, Alcatraz was designed to be a strict penitentiary. Alcatraz’s reputation may not be as accurate as it seems, though, for instance, always one man to a cell at Alcatraz, unlike almost any other prison. It was considered to be better than any other federal prison, and several inmates actually requested a transfer to Alcatraz.
According to the bureau, they also stated that the food on Alcatraz was considered to have amazing food as a way to try and get inmates to follow the rules, which worked well. The penitentiary held infamous criminals such as Alvin Kapis and Arthur Baker, but some items were sent to Alcatraz because they were considered dangerous or escape artists. Others spent shorter stints in Alcatraz at the highly structured prison and usually got transferred back to a less secure prison to serve the rest of their sentence. Then, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, closed the federal penitentiary in 1963. Alcatraz is currently a museum administered by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area since 1972, placing the prison in a historical context.
The NPS says it represents the federal government’s response to post-prohibition, post-depression America. This institution and the men confined within its walls reflect our society during this era. The original impetus for creating Alcatraz Prison lies in the US government’s desire to create a high-profile prison that represents the justice department’s response to fears around public safety and organized crime. For federal prison officials, Alcatraz served as an experiment in handling problematic inmates. The park service says it adds the model they developed on Alcatraz would later serve as a blueprint for the high-security federal prison located in Marion, Illinois in the early 1900s it became a site of the US disciplinary barracks for the US army in 1933 the island was transferred to the US department of justice for use by the federal bureau of prisons. Alcatraz Island is now a popular national park site that has been open to the public since 1973.