What you should know about Trump's plan for the reopening of Alcatraz

SIn his closure in 1963, the Alcatraz prison became a legend. The apparently inevitable federal prison on a California island, surrounded by cold and powerful currents, gained some of the most famous prisoners in the story of Al “Scarface” Capone to George “machine gun” Kelly.

But now, decades since the island of National Park Service and a popular tourist destination, Donald Trump wants to convert him back into prison.

What Trump said about Alcatraz

“Build up again and open Alcatraz!” The President posted and announced on Sunday evening that he has instructed the office for prisons, the Ministry of Justice, the Bunding Bundesburo for Investigations and the Homeland Security, to reopen a significantly expanded and rebuilt “prison on Alcatraz Island in order to” submit America in America and to accommodate violent perpetrators “.

The step comes when Trump pursued aggressive criminal policy in his second term, including the signing of commands that promote the use of extreme punishments and the death penalty, target the detained trans women and expand the police. Trump was also criticized for this at a meeting in April between Trump and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said Trump that he would next “for” deport the Americans to deport El Salvador. In January, Trump ordered the opening of a prison in Guantanamo Bay, where the USA has long leased a location from Cuba, to which its government would send the “worst criminal alien”.

Read more: Trump changed in the next 100 days to improve his immigration relapse

“When we were a more serious nation in the past, we did not hesitate to lock the most dangerous criminals and keep them far away from any way to which they could harm. So it should be,” added Trump in his social post of truth. “We are no longer kept as a hostage than criminals, rackets and judges, who are afraid of doing their work and allowing us to remove criminals that came into our country illegally.”

Trump told reporters on Sunday evening when he returned to the White House from Florida that his Alcatraz plan had only an idea that I had to counter the “radicalized judge [that] I would like to tests for everyone – remember – every single person who is illegally in our country. “Alcatraz is” a symbol of law and order, “he said.

However, experts say that Trump misunderstood the history and functionality of Alcatraz.

“So many of his guidelines sound good – at least for those with the same policy – as long as they don't think too seriously,” Ashley Rubin, Associate Professor in the sociology department of the University of Hawaii in Mānoa, told Time. “If you do this, you can recognize all the practical problems and holes in the argument and if we actually do these things, it will only make us worse. The reopening of Alcatraz is like this. It would be much more secure and punishable for Americans to use our current prison system than to reopen as a tourist attraction.”

The story of Alcatraz and why it was closed

Long before Alcatraz became a prison, it was a military fortress. Originally the land of the Ohlone people in the San Francisco Bay Area, the island, was named La Isla de Las Alcatraces After his great Pelicans that a Spanish naval officer who arrived in 1775 Alactraces In Spanish. Later the island became a US Marine defense party after the Mexican-American War of 1848. The US military also used the island to keep prisoners, including the sympathizers of the Confederation during the civil war, and the Hopi residents who opposed the government decree of the government and the official education program of 1895. Until 1912 it was restored as an official military prison.

In 1933 the Ministry of Justice took over the island and made it a federal prison of maximum security, partly in response to an increase in organized crime during the ban. If the surrounding conditions did not escape to a hard view, the prison was retrofitted so that every prisoner was held in a cell and a guard was on duty for three prisoners each. Thirty -six men tried 14 different refugees in the 29 years in which prison was open, and almost all of them were caught or died.

However, the prison was closed in March 1963. His institutions collapsed and had cost the restoration of 3 to 5 million US dollars, and the remote location had to be too expensive to maintain the operating costs -almost three times higher than any other federal prison, according to the prisons -because everything, including drinking water, had to be sent.

The prison has long been a place of public fascination. It was presented in the film from 1962 Birdman von Alcatraz Via Robert Stroud, a convicted criminal who studied the birds he had imprisoned, and became an ornithologist who even found a remedy for a common hemorrhagic illness. It was also presented in the film from 1979 Escape from AlcatrazWith Clint Eastwood, based on the real 1962 escape of three prisoners who were never found, as well as in the fictional action thriller from 1996 The rockwith Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

After buying the NPS in 1972, the island became a large tourist attraction and, according to the agency, brings more than a million visitors every year.

How the office for prisons and others reacted – and what experts tell about Trump's suggestion

A spokesman for the prison office informed the Associated Press that the BOP would be kept “all presidential commands”, but did not explain how he would restore or reopen the prison, while it was under the jurisdiction of the NPS, whose employees and the financing were threatened by trump cuts, especially during the BOP -PASTICER, which opened up against their own facilities.

“The president's proposal is not a serious one,” the former spokesman for the House of Representatives and the California Democratic MP Nancy Pelosi on X.

David Ward, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, who interviewed prisoners in Alcatraz and wrote about prisoners, tells the time that there is little practical use to reopen Alcatraz as a prison, but Trump could be more interested in his name and legacy than in practicability.

“The reopening of Alcatraz will serve as a symbol of law, order and justice,” said Trump in his social announcement of the truth.

Rubin says that Alcatraz historically was not the most efficient or punishable prison in the maximum. Rather, it served as “public relations” and “administrative ointment”. On the one hand, its capacity is limited by the size of the island. If the prison worked, it could hold a maximum of 300 people – or up to about 1,000 if they are overcrowded.

And while it was invoiced to keep “the worst of the worst”, Rubin actually says only a handful of notorious criminals together with some prisoners who had previously managed to flee or were “difficult” in other prisons: “People like to talk about the Hannibal Lecters in the world, but they do not usually end up about these species of people.