SAN FRANCISCO — President Donald Trump says he’s directing his authorities to reopen and develop Alcatraz, the infamous former jail on a hard-to-reach California island off San Francisco that has been closed for greater than 60 years.
In a submit on his Fact Social web site Sunday night, Trump wrote that, “For too lengthy, America has been suffering from vicious, violent, and repeat Prison Offenders, the dregs of society, who won’t ever contribute something apart from Distress and Struggling. After we have been a extra critical Nation, in occasions previous, we didn’t hesitate to lock up probably the most harmful criminals, and maintain them distant from anybody they may hurt. That is the way in which it is imagined to be.”
“That’s the reason, immediately,” he mentioned, “I’m directing the Bureau of Prisons, along with the Division of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Safety, to reopen a considerably enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to accommodate America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
Trump’s directive to rebuild and reopen the long-shuttered penitentiary was the most recent salvo in his effort to overtake how and the place federal prisoners and immigration detainees are locked up. However such a transfer would possible be an costly and difficult proposition. The jail was closed in 1963 on account of crumbling infrastructure and the excessive prices of repairing and supplying the island facility, as a result of the whole lot from gasoline to meals needed to be introduced by boat.
Bringing the power as much as modern-day requirements would require large investments at a time when the Bureau of Prisons has been shuttering prisons for comparable infrastructure points.
The jail – infamously inescapable as a result of robust ocean currents and chilly Pacific waters that encompass it – was referred to as the “The Rock” and housed a few of the nation’s most infamous criminals, together with gangster Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
It has lengthy been a part of the cultural creativeness and has been the topic of quite a few films, together with “The Rock” starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Nonetheless within the 29 years it was open, 36 males tried 14 separate escapes, in line with the FBI. Almost all have been caught or did not survive the try.
The destiny of three specific inmates – John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris – is of some debate and was dramatized within the 1979 movie “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood.
Alcatraz Island is now a significant vacationer web site that’s function by the Nationwide Park Service and is a chosen Nationwide Historic Landmark.
Trump, returning to the White Home on Sunday night time after a weekend in Florida, mentioned he’d give you the thought due to frustrations with “radicalized judges” who’ve insisted these being deported obtain due course of. Alcatraz, he mentioned, has lengthy been a “image of regulation and order. You understand, it is obtained fairly a historical past.”
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons mentioned in an announcement that the company “will adjust to all Presidential Orders.” The spokesperson didn’t instantly reply questions from The Related Press relating to the practicality and feasibility of reopening Alcatraz or the company’s function in the way forward for the previous jail given the Nationwide Park Service’s management of the island.
Former Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat whose district contains the island, questioned the feasibility of reopening the jail after so a few years. “It’s now a very fashionable nationwide park and main vacationer attraction. The President’s proposal will not be a critical one,” she wrote on X.
The island serves as a veritable time machine to a bygone period of corrections. The Bureau of Prisons presently has 16 penitentiaries performing the identical high-security capabilities as Alcatraz, together with its most safety facility in Florence, Colorado, and the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, which is house to the federal loss of life chamber.
The order comes as Trump has been clashing with the courts as he tries to ship accused gang members to a maximum-security jail in El Salvador, with out due course of. Trump has additionally floated the legally doubtful thought of sending some federal U.S. prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Middle, referred to as CECOT.
Trump has additionally directed the opening of a detention middle at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to carry as much as 30,000 of what he has labeled the “worst felony aliens.”
The Bureau of Prisons has confronted myriad crises lately and has been subjected to elevated scrutiny after Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide at a federal jail in New York Metropolis in 2019. An AP investigation uncovered deep, beforehand unreported flaws inside the Bureau of Prisons. AP reporting has disclosed widespread felony exercise by workers, dozens of escapes, continual violence, deaths and extreme staffing shortages which have hampered responses to emergencies, together with assaults and suicides.
The AP’s investigation additionally uncovered rampant sexual abuse at a federal girls’s jail in Dublin, California. Final yr, President Joe Biden signed a regulation strengthening oversight of the company after AP reporting spotlighted its many flaws.
On the identical time, the Bureau of Prisons is working in a state of flux – with a lately put in new director and a redefined mission that features taking in hundreds of immigration detainees at a few of its prisons and jails below an settlement with the Division of Homeland Safety. The company final yr closed a number of amenities, partly to chop prices, however can also be within the means of constructing a brand new jail in Kentucky.
Copyright © 2025 by The Related Press. All Rights Reserved.
