US President Donald Trump wants to rebuild, enlarge and reopen the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Alcatraz served as a maximum-security prison from August 1934 to March 1963. Back in the day, it was used to detain the worst of the worst, including perhaps America’s most infamous gangster, Al Capone.
The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary is on an island, around 2 kilometres offshore from San Francisco. It was considered impossible to escape, because anyone who broke out of Alcatraz would have had to swim through shark-infested waters. No one is known to have survived that, despite multiple escape attempts.
But Alcatraz was shut down on 21st March 1963, because it was too expensive to maintain. It used to cost about three times as much to house a prisoner at Alcatraz, compared to a maximum-security prison on the mainland.
The prison was emptied out in 1963, and it was left derelict for a few years. Them in 1969, about 90 Native Americans landed on Alcatraz Island and “reclaimed” it. The Native Americans occupied Alcatraz for 19 months, before the US government ousted them in June 1971.
In 1972, the US government handed Alcatraz Island over to the US National Park Service. In 1976, Alcatraz was listed on the US National Register of Historic Places, and 10 years later, in 1986, Alcatraz became a US National Historic Landmark.
Today, Alcatraz is a tourist hotspot. Alcatraz Island and the Prison Complex draw in over a million tourists every year. It has also been the venue of art galleries, and it has even been involved in triathlons, dubbed “Escape from Alcatraz”.
But it seems Trump wants people to start fearing Alcatraz again. He wants it to become a symbol of punishment in the popular imagination. Especially for undocumented immigrants in the US.
Trump has hinted that he plans to use Alcatraz in his mass deportation drive. His administration has been rounding up undocumented migrants and deporting them ever since he was sworn in. Some have even been sent to a prison in El Salvador. But Trump’s deportation scheme has been facing legal hurdles. So, perhaps he’s looking for a domestic alternative, and he seems to have landed on Alcatraz.
