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After Donald Trump announced his wildly impractical plan to turn Alcatraz back into an operating federal prison, as it was until 62 years ago, people have been wondering how the president came up with such an idea.
When asked at the White House about turning the popular national park in the middle of San Francisco Bay into a federal lockup, the president said: “It was just an idea I had.”
Some online joked that Trump had been watching Clint Eastwood’s “Escape from Alcatraz” — which indeed had recently aired on a South Florida PBS station — and the 1979 film reminded him that the small island had once housed America’s most notorious prison, housing the “most ruthless and violent Offenders,” as Trump wrote on X and Truth Social.
But a report in the Daily Beast said that the president’s idea to reopen Alcatraz could have come from his son, Donald Trump Jr., who floated the conceit on X in late January. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz proposal as “not a serious one.” One possible reason for Pelosi or anyone to come to this conclusion is that Trump Jr. appeared to push the idea as one of his attempts to be funny on social media.
On Jan. 29, the ever-jocular Trump Jr. responded to a post from a “citizen journalist” X account, which was publicizing his father’s announcement that he would send the “worst” undocumented immigrants to a proposed 30,000-bed facility on Guantanamo Bay.
Trump Jr. shared this news with this comment: “Now this is a great idea. Maybe we should also reopen Alcatraz?!?!”
But Trump Jr’s. comment could easily be interpreted as a joke, or as one of his snide quips, rather than a serious policy proposal.
However, three months later, his father was trying to act like it was a serious policy proposal by taking to Truth Social to proclaim: “REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!”
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Starting in 1934, Alcatraz was used as a federal penitentiary, incarcerating more than 1,500 prisoners until its closure in 1963. It was built to be America’s most secure prison, due to its island location and its being seemingly impossible to escape. Its notorious inmates included Al Capone, George “Machine-Gun” Kelly and Robert Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz.” It also was the setting for the 1962 escape of three inmates, led by bank robber Frank Morris, who used dummy heads to fool guards and fled in a homemade raft across across San Francisco Bay.
But the federal government closed the prison because it was too expensive to run — costing three times as much as most other federal prisons. Although it has evolved into one of the Bay Area’s most popular tourist destinations, the Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies would now face major challenges if they tried to make Alcatraz an operating prison again.
“It’s nowhere near a functioning island by any means,” local history John Martini told this news organization. “God, it’s a wreck.”
The main prison has been deteriorating for years, save for some seismic upgrades that made it safe for visitors. Were Trump to raze the existing structure and build anew, that too could be prohibitively expensive, Martini said. The island has no source of fresh water, which means that contractors have to ship their own water to make concrete.
The island is also a rock, with no soil to drill into. On top of that, there’s no electricity on the island, except what’s generated from a small system of solar panels. Meanwhile, it would need to be removed from the National Register of Historic Places, and Trump’s plan could end up getting held up by California’s strong environmental protection laws.
As of Monday afternoon, no executive order had been posted to the White House website. Curiously, Trump Jr. also hasn’t shared news about his father’s Alcatraz plans on X or Instagram. His apparent silence on this matter is surprising, given that he’s a regular commenter on social media and could conceivably take credit for inspiring this scheme of his father’s.
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