On the menu today: If you’ve ever wondered where President Donald Trump gets his ideas, the answer, at least in one case, may well be PBS. There are a lot of obstacles to Trump’s latest idea to turn one of San Francisco’s biggest tourist attractions back into a working federal prison, but at least we got to see NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser squirming as Trump made it sound like they would have a role in the re-prison-ification of Alcatraz. Meanwhile, a person who reflexively insists I’m wrong about everything concludes that $425 billion in bilateral trade in goods is no big deal.
Welcome to the Rock . . . for a Little While Longer
Seemingly out of the blue, Sunday evening, President Trump declared he intended to reopen the infamous Alcatraz Island prison:
REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ! For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. 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. No longer will we tolerate these Serial Offenders who spread filth, bloodshed, and mayhem on our streets. That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders. 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. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Trump was in Mar-a-Lago at the time; The Independent, an online British newspaper, reported, “WLRN 26 — Miami’s local PBS affiliate — broadcasted Escape from Alcatraz on Saturday at 9 p.m. ET. The movie, which stars Clint Eastwood, was re-aired the following morning at 11 a.m.”
If the airing of the movie was indeed a factor in the president’s announcement, perhaps the most shocking aspect of all of this is that Donald Trump watches PBS.
The U.S. government has plenty of problems, but room for federal prisoners is not one of them. As of May 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons counts 143,675 federal inmates in custody, meaning they are at 92 percent of capacity. The number of federal inmates is actually down significantly from the peak in 2013, at 219,298. (With that said, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons has warned about a “growing number of aged and obsolete federal correctional facilities, which are no longer cost-effective or sustainable to operate and maintain.”)
The U.S. has 122 federal prisons; the oldest is the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan. Way back on July 1, 1895, inmates were received by the penitentiary at its original site at Fort Leavenworth.
The newest is the planned Letcher County Federal Correctional Institution and Federal Prison Camp in southeastern Kentucky, announced in October. When completed, the medium-security Letcher County facility is expected to hold 1,408 inmates; construction is expected to take about three years.
Alcatraz served as a prison for more than 100 years. The U.S. BOP details how America’s most notorious maximum-security prison ended up a bit more than a mile off the shore of downtown San Francisco:
The California Gold Rush, the resulting boom in the growth of San Francisco, and the need to protect San Francisco Bay led the U.S. Army to build a Citadel, or fortress, at the top of the island in the early 1850s. The Army also made plans to install more than 100 cannons on the island, making Alcatraz the most heavily fortified military site on the West Coast. Together with Fort Point and Lime Point, Alcatraz formed a “triangle of defense” designed to protect the entrance to the bay. The island was also the site of the first operational lighthouse on the West Coast of the United States.
From 1909 through 1911, the military prisoners on Alcatraz built the new prison, which was designated the Pacific Branch, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks for the U.S. Army. It was this prison building that later became famous as “The Rock.”
The U.S. Army used the island for more than 80 years — from 1850 until 1933, when the island was transferred to the U.S. Department of Justice for use by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The Federal Government had decided to open a maximum-security, minimum-privilege penitentiary to deal with the most incorrigible inmates in Federal prisons, and to show the law-abiding public that the Federal Government was serious about stopping the rampant crime of the 1920s and 1930s.
As you likely have heard, Al Capone and George “Machine-Gun” Kelly were among those imprisoned there, and the infamous Boston mobster and fugitive Whitey Bulger was imprisoned there in 1959.
But as our Haley Strack notes, it was closed for good reasons at the time: “To make the prison operable would require a massive amount of money; there’s no access to outside power lines or clean water on the island, facilities have deteriorated from time and saltwater damage, and weather conditions around the island make large-scale renovations difficult.” According to USA Today, “Even at its maximum capacity, Alcatraz would only have held 336 inmates, but its population never reached more than about 300, according to research in a 1994 paper published by the Oxford University Press.”
Part of Alcatraz’s infamy is the fact that it is visible to anyone in the San Francisco Bay area, at least when there isn’t fog.
If you rank among the most infamous American criminals today, you’re likely to end up at the federal prison in Fremont County, Colo., ADX Florence. (Interestingly, it’s been nicknamed “The Alcatraz of the Rockies.”) ADX Florence was constructed in 1994 and opened one year later. About a three-hour drive from Denver, ADX Florence is conveniently located in the middle of nowhere, and thus people don’t see it.
Like soldiers in a foxhole, the residents of Supermax’s Unit D developed the kind of bonds that come when your days are no longer your own.
Perhaps they craved human contact as they lived out their time, confined in solitary cells 23 hours a day, in a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo. They certainly had enough in common: Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef all favored death and destruction by bombing.
Known inside the prison walls as “Bombers Row,” it was here, on a wing for the most violent of criminals, that the notorious inmates formed unusual friendships. Through walls that muffled their voices, the men shouted to each other from their cells. One-hour exercise sessions in enclosed wire cages outside the prison walls allowed for better discourse.
Future “Bombers Row” residents included McVeigh’s co-conspirator Terry Nichols, Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, and Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
No one has ever escaped ADX Florence. Escapes from federal prisons do occur; in an 18-month stretch in 2020 and 2021, 29 prisoners escaped from federal facilities across the country, but it’s worth keeping in mind that all of them “occurred at minimum-security federal prison camps, some of which don’t even have fences, and house inmates the Bureau of Prisons considers to be the lowest security risk.”
(Readers of the Dangerous Clique series know that the most dangerous women inmates in federal custody are imprisoned at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The exceptionally inaccurately named leaker of classified information, Reality Winner, is among the former inmates of Carswell.)
It would be easy to dismiss Trump’s proposal as a one-day social-media moment. But on Monday, Trump was at the White House, and during an announcement that the 2027 NFL Draft will take place in Washington on the National Mall, he returned to the topic of Alcatraz:
It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz, Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies, but uh, it’s right now a museum, believe it or not. A lot of people go there. It has the most violent criminals in the world. And nobody ever escaped. One person almost got there, but they, as you know, the story, they found his clothing rather badly ripped up and — uh — it was a lot of shark bites, a lot of, a lot of problems. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country and so we’re going to look at it, some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that and we had a little conversation. I think it’s going to be very interesting.
(Fun detail: The two people standing next to Trump as he said, “Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that” were NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser, both looking exceptionally uncomfortable.)
So, to sum up:
- Closing Alcatraz as a National Park Service site would forego $60 million in revenue per year.
- It would remove one of the most popular tourist attractions in San Francisco.
- Establishing a modern prison up to standards would cost a lot, and the original reason the prison was closed was the high cost of operating it.
- There’s not a pressing need for additional prison capacity at the federal level.
- We’re already building another new federal prison in eastern Kentucky.
- The prisoner capacity of Alcatraz would likely only be around a couple hundred.
- There’s little sign that crime rates are influenced by whether there is an infamous federal prison within public view.
But on the other hand, Alcatraz “just represented something strong having to do with law and order.”
We live in an era where major U.S. Department of Justice initiatives can be triggered by what the president saw on television earlier in the weekend.
ADDENDUM: Over at that other place I write, I participated in a discussion about the economic effects of the tariffs, and when asked for what advice I’d give the White House, I noted, “Every time there’s a sign of progress on trade deals, the markets go up and presumably the damage done to everyone’s 401(k)s and college savings accounts gets mitigated a bit. So, I’d be talking up how close we are to a deal with our other large trading partners — Japan, South Korea, etc.”
A reader sneered, “Is Jim okay? Japan and South Korea aren’t even in the top 5 trading partners.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, Japan is the sixth-largest U.S. trade partner and South Korea is the seventh. In 2024, U.S. goods trade with Japan totaled an estimated $227.9 billion, and U.S. goods trade with South Korea totaled an estimated $197.1 billion. (For what it’s worth, Wikipedia ranks Japan fourth and South Korea sixth.)
That’s $425 billion in bilateral trade in goods, not even counting services. Yeah, you’re right, pal, that’s small potatoes.