Trump says he wants Alcatraz to be restored as a prison

President Trump said on Sunday that he wanted the federal law enforcement authorities to work in the restoration of Alcatraz, now a museum, to a functioning prison with maximum insurance.

Mr. Trump repeated one of his constant choruses that the United States had become a dangerous, lawless place, and wrote on social media that he wanted Alcatraz, an island in the Bay of San Francisco, to be enlarged and rebuilt.

It was not immediately clear how his thinking could be put into practice, since such a project would be extremely expensive and the administration already intended to reduce billions of dollars from the budget budget of the Ministry of Justice.

Mr. Trump said that he had the Bureau of Prisons, the Ministry of Justice and the Homeland Security Department together with the FBI – a strange decision, since the office does not play a role in the detention of people who were condemned for crimes.

A reopened Alcatraz, wrote Mr. Trump, would “serve as a symbol of law, order and justice. The prison conquered public imagination as a home of the” worst of the worst “until it was closed in 1963 and finally became a popular museum attraction.

In addition to the gangster, who is known as the “machine gun Kelly”, and Al Capone, whose multiple charges, which Mr. Trump often mentioned on the campaign path to describe himself as unfair, is known for the escape of three men in 1962. They have never been found and it remains unclear whether they survived swimming from the island, which are more than a mile of shore from cold water with strong water. Today Alcatraz is known as a moist, cold and nostalgic staple food from tourist packages and excursions for children.

In comparison, the federal government's current Super Maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, has never had an inmate escape.

In California, Scott Wiener, a senator of the democratic state that represented San Francisco, described Mr. Trump's idea as “absurd at first glance” and the latest example of what he described as “continued behavior of the president”.

A spokesman for governor Gavin Newsom laughed when he was asked about the president's command. “It looks like it is a breakdown day in Washington, DC,” said Izzy Gardon, communication director of the governor.

Mr. Gardon pointed out that it was more than six decades since Alcatraz worked as a prison, and that it would take many years and that there would be considerable federal investments in a facility to accommodate inmates and significant federal investments than the president had declared that he wanted to lower the expenditure.

Maggie Haberman Reported reports.