President Trump stated on Sunday that he needed federal regulation enforcement businesses to work on restoring Alcatraz, now a museum, to a functioning maximum-security jail.
Repeating considered one of his fixed refrains that america had change into a harmful, lawless place, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he needed Alcatraz, an island in San Francisco Bay, to be enlarged and rebuilt “to accommodate America’s most ruthless and violent offenders. We’ll not be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and judges which can be afraid to do their job and permit us to take away criminals, who got here into our nation illegally.”
It was not instantly clear how his musing could possibly be put into motion, provided that any such venture could be terribly costly and that the administration already deliberate to chop billions of {dollars} from the Justice Division funds.
Mr. Trump stated he had instructed the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Division and the Homeland Safety Division to work on his concept, together with the F.B.I. — a curious alternative provided that the bureau performs no position in incarcerating folks convicted of crimes.
A reopened Alcatraz, Mr. Trump wrote, would “function a logo of regulation, order, and justice.” The jail captured the general public creativeness as the house of the “worst of the worst” till it was closed in 1963 and finally became a preferred museum attraction.
Along with holding the gangster often known as “Machine Gun Kelly” and Al Capone — whose a number of indictments Mr. Trump usually talked about on the marketing campaign path to explain himself as unfairly persecuted — Alcatraz is most well-known for the escape of three males in 1962. They have been by no means discovered, and it stays unclear whether or not they survived the swim from the island, which is greater than a mile from shore in chilly water with robust currents. At the moment, Alcatraz is finest often known as a humid, frigid and nostalgic staple of vacationer packages and kids’s area journeys.
By comparability, the present federal super-maximum safety jail in Florence, Colo., has by no means had an inmate escape.
In California, Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator representing San Francisco, referred to as Mr. Trump’s concept “absurd on its face” and the most recent instance of what he referred to as the president’s “persevering with unhinged conduct.”
A spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom laughed when requested concerning the president’s order. “Appears to be like prefer it’s Distraction Day once more in Washington, D.C.,” Izzy Gardon, the governor’s director of communications, stated.
Mr. Gardon identified that it had been greater than six a long time since Alcatraz operated as a jail, and that turning it again right into a facility to accommodate inmates would take a few years and important federal funding at a time when the president has stated he desires to slash spending.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
