What to Know About Trump’s Plan to Reopen Alcatraz

05 May 2025, 09:30 by Miranda Jeyaretnam · TIME

Since its closure in 1963, Alcatraz Prison has become the stuff of legend. The seemingly inescapable federal penitentiary on a California island surrounded by frigid and powerful currents gained notoriety for housing some of history’s most famous prisoners, from Al “Scarface” Capone to George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

But now, decades since the island was purchased by the National Park Service and turned into a popular tourist destination, Donald Trump wants to convert it back into a prison.

What Trump said about Alcatraz

“REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!” the President posted on Truth Social on Sunday evening, announcing that he has directed the Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Homeland Security to “reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt” prison on Alcatraz Island to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”

The move comes as Trump has pursued more aggressively punitive policies in his second term, including signing orders that encourage the use of extreme sentences and the death penalty, that target incarcerated trans women, and that expand police powers. Trump has also been criticized for eschewing the rule of law in carrying out a mass deportation campaign, detaining and deporting both undocumented immigrants as well as people legally in the U.S. without due process. At an April meeting between Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump said he’d be “all for” deporting Americans to El Salvador next. In January, Trump ordered the opening of a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. has long leased a site from Cuba, to which his Administration would send the “worst criminal aliens.”

“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. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Trump added in his Truth Social post. “We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally.”

Trump told reporters on Sunday night while returning to the White House from Florida that his Alcatraz plan was “just an idea I’ve had” to counter the “radicalized judges [that] want to have trials for every single—think of it—every single person that’s in our country illegally.” Alcatraz is “a symbol of law and order,” he said. “It’s got quite a history, frankly.”

Experts, however, say Trump misunderstands the history and functionality of Alcatraz.

“So many of his policies sound good—at least to those with the same politics—as long as you don’t think about them too seriously,” Ashley Rubin, an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, tells TIME. “If you do, you realize all the practical problems and holes in the reasoning and how if we actually do these things, it will just make us worse off. Reopening Alcatraz is like that. It would be much safer for Americans and punitive toward criminals to use our current prison system than to reopen a tourist attraction.”

The history of Alcatraz and why it closed

Long before Alcatraz became the site of a prison, it was a military fortress. Originally the land of the Ohlone people indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Area, the island was named La Isla de las Alcatraces after its large pelicans that a Spanish Navy officer who arrived in 1775 thought were gannets, called alactraces in Spanish. Later, the island became a U.S. naval defense fort after the Mexican-American War of 1848. The U.S. military also used the island to hold prisoners, including confederate sympathizers during the Civil War and Hopi Native Americans who resisted the government’s land decrees and mandatory education programs in 1895. By 1912, it was rebuilt as an official military prison.

In 1933, the Justice Department took over the island and made it a maximum-security federal penitentiary, partly in response to a rise in organized crime during prohibition. If the surrounding conditions didn’t make escape a hard enough prospect, the prison was retrofitted so that each prisoner was kept to one cell, and one guard was on duty for every three prisoners. Thirty-six men attempted 14 different escapes over the 29 years that the prison was open, and nearly all were caught or died in the attempt.

But the prison closed in March 1963. Its facilities were crumbling and would have cost $3 to $5 million to restore, and its isolated location made operating costs too expensive to maintain—nearly three times higher than any other federal prison, according to the Bureau of Prisons—because everything, including potable water, had to be shipped in.

The prison has long been a site of public fascination. It was featured in the 1962 film Birdman of Alcatraz about Robert Stroud, a convicted felon who studied the birds he saw while incarcerated and became an ornithologist, even finding a cure to a common avian hemorrhagic disease. It was also featured in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood, and based on the real-life 1962 attempted escape of three prisoners who were never found, as well as in the 1996 fictional action thriller The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

After its purchase by the NPS in 1972, the island has become a major tourist attraction and brings in more than a million visitors each year, according to the agency.

How the Bureau of Prisons and others have responded—and what experts tell TIME of Trump’s proposal

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons told the Associated Press that the BOP will “comply with all Presidential Orders,” but did not explain how it would restore or reopen the prison while it is under the jurisdiction of the NPS, whose staff and funding have been threatened by Trump cuts, particularly while the BOP is struggling to keep its own facilities open amid deteriorating infrastructure and staffing shortages.

“The President’s proposal is not a serious one,” former House Speaker and California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi posted on X.

David Ward, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Minnesota who interviewed and wrote about prisoners at Alcatraz, tells TIME that there’s little practical use to try to reopen Alcatraz as a prison, but Trump may be more interested in its name and legacy than practicality.

“The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE,” Trump said in his Truth Social announcement.

Rubin says that even historically, Alcatraz was not the most efficient or most punitive maximum-security prison. Rather, it served more as a “public relations piece” and “administrative salve.” For one, its capacity is limited by the island’s size. When the prison was functioning, it could hold at maximum around 300 people—or up to about 1,000 if overcrowded.

And while it was billed to hold “the worst of the worst,” in reality, says Rubin, it held just a handful of notorious criminals along with some prisoners who had previously managed to escape or who were “difficult” at other prisons: “People like to talk about the Hannibal Lecters of the world, but they usually don’t end up in these types of facilities. It’s usually people who are just a thorn in the side of administrators.”

If the BOP were to go ahead with rebuilding Alcatraz, however, the old prison facility is significantly deteriorated and would have to be entirely rebuilt, Rubin says, which would likely take years and could go beyond Trump’s term. Another possibility, Rubin suggests, would be for Alcatraz to become a “rapid turnover facility,” where the Administration might send people without due process before deporting them, in which case it would mostly serve as a “photo-op” for Trump.

“The publicity of Alcatraz Island is what [Trump] wants: a bastion where inmates are treated inhumanely because they deserve it,” says Ward. It’s a “monument to punishment and brutality.”

Given the challenges restoring the island prison presents, Trump could even pursue his goal of “reopening” Alcatraz by transplanting the name elsewhere, such as El Salvador. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s been done: After Alcatraz closed, it was succeeded by two supermax prisons: “New Alcatraz” in Marion, Illinois, and the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado. “The name Alcatraz always goes with the prisons because it conveys the message the government likes to have,” says Ward, “which is, ‘we’re doing real punishment for the bad guys.’”