New York (AP) President Donald Trump says he is instructed his government to re-open Alcatraz, the notorious former prison, and expand it to a hard-to-reach California island for San Francisco that has been closed for more than 60 years.
In a post on his truth social site on Sunday evening, Trump wrote that: “Too long America is plagued by cruel, violent and repeated criminal perpetrators, the droesem of society, who will never contribute anything other than misery and suffering. When we were a more serious nation, in the past.
“That is why, today,” he said, “I lead the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Ministry of Justice, FBI and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially extensive and rebuilt Alcatraz to house the most ruthless and violent and violent perpetrators of America.”
Trump's guideline to rebuild and reopen the long-term Penitentiary was the last Salvo in his attempt to revise how and where federal prisoners and immigration prisoners are locked up. But such a movement would probably be an expensive and challenging proposition. The prison was closed in 1963 due to crumbling infrastructure and the high costs for repairing and delivering the island facility, because everything had to be brought from fuel to food by boat.
Bringing the facility to contemporary standards would require huge investments at a time when the Bureau of Prisons has made prisons for similar infrastructure problems.
The prison – notorious inevitable because of the strong ocean currents and cold pacific waters around it – was known as the “The Rock” and housed some of the most notorious criminals of the nation, including gangster Al Capone and George “Machinegeweer” Kelly.
It has long been part of the cultural imagination and has been the subject of countless films, including “The Rock” starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Still in the 29 years that it was open, 36 men tried 14 separate escapes, according to the FBI. Almost everyone was caught or did not survive the attempt.
The fate of three specific prisoners – John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris – is of any debate and was dramatized in the film 'Escape from Alcatraz' from 1979 with Clinton Eastwood.
Alcatraz Island is now an important tourist site operated by the National Park Service and a designated National Historical Monument.
Trump, who returned to the White House on Sunday evening after a weekend in Florida, said that he would come up with the idea because of frustrations with “radical judges” who have insisted that those who are deported receive an appropriate process. Alcatraz, he said, has long been a “symbol of law and order. You know, it has a good history.”
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that the agency “will meet all presidential orders.” The spokesperson did not immediately answer questions from the Associated Press about the usability and feasibility of reopening Alcatraz or the role of the agency in the future of the former prison, given the control of the National Park Service on the Island.
Former house speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Californian democrat whose district includes the island, doubted the feasibility of reopening the prison after so many years. “It is now a very popular national park and an important tourist attraction. The president's proposal is not serious,” she wrote on X.
The island serves as a real time machine for a bygone era of corrections. The Bureau of Prisons currently has 16 penitentiaries who perform the same high -protection functions as Alcatraz, including the maximum safety facility in Florence, Colorado, and the American penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, who is home to the federal death chamber.
The order is because Trump bumps with the courts while he is being tried to send accused gang members to a prison of maximum security in El Salvador, without the correct process. Trump has also driven the legally dubious idea to send some federal American prisoners to the terrorism limitation center, known as Cecot.
Trump has also dedicated the opening of a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to 30,000 of what he has labeled the “worst criminal aliens”.
In recent years, the Bureau of Prisons has confronted with countless crises and is subject to increased control after the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in a federal prison in New York City in 2019. An AP investigation has deep, previously unprecedented errors within the Bureau of Prisons. AP report has announced widespread criminal activities by employees, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and serious staff shortages that have impeded the reactions to emergency situations, including attacks and suicides.
The investigation of the AP also exposed unbridled sexual abuse in a federal women's prison in Dublin, California. Last year President Joe Biden signed a law that strengthened the supervision of the office after AP reported his many defects in the spotlight.
At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons works in a state of Flux – with a recently installed new director and a re -defined mission that includes the recording of thousands of immigration prisoners with some of his prisons and prisons under an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. Last year, the agency closed various facilities, partly to save costs, but is also building a new prison in Kentucky.
___ Sisak reported from Philadelphia. Associated Press writers Gary Fields in Washington, Aamer Madhani in West Palm Beach, Florida and Michael Balsamo in New York have contributed to this report.
