WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump said on May 4 that he had directed officials to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz prison, the notorious federal jail based on a small island in California that shuttered six decades ago.
The jail will house “America’s most ruthless and violent offenders”, he wrote on his Truth Social platform, adding that the institution will be “substantially enlarged”.
Alcatraz closed as a federal prison in 1963 after just 29 years of operation because it was too expensive to continue, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). It was nearly three times more costly to operate than any other federal prison, the BOP website said.
In addition, corrosion from the salt air of San Francisco Bay means the facility – which had a capacity of just 336 prisoners – requires additional maintenance that prisons in other locations do not.
Despite failing as a federal prison, Alcatraz, which lies just 2km off the coast of San Francisco, enjoys a near mythological status in American popular culture as a fortress for housing the worst-of-the-worst offenders, including notorious prohibition-era mob boss Al Capone and Robert Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz”.
It was the site of many fantastical escape attempts by inmates and the former prison has served as the setting for several Hollywood blockbusters, including Clint Eastwood’s Escape From Alcatraz and Sean Connery’s The Rock.
Alcatraz currently operates primarily as a tourist destination under the US National Park Service. While the former main cell house is the featured attraction, many other buildings on the island that supported the prison’s operation now lie in ruins.
Mr Trump’s post did not disclose the costs of rebuilding it, nor an expected timeline for the reopening.
The costs of such a move would likely reach at least the hundreds of millions of dollars, based on construction budgets for recent state and federal supermax facilities.
US lawmakers may also have a say, as Congress would likely need to approve additional prison-building funding to enable Mr Trump’s plan, which would stack atop the roughly US$3 billion (S$3.9 billion) maintenance and repair backlog the BOP in 2024 told Congress it was trying to work through.
Mr Trump has made cracking down on crime – particularly that committed by migrants – a key element of his second term in the White House.
“When we were a more serious nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he wrote in his post.
“No longer will we tolerate these serial offenders who spread filth, bloodshed and mayhem on our streets,” he said. AFP, BLOOMBERG, REUTERS
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