Alcatraz: Donald Trump wants to use the prison island again

US President Donald Trump plans to put the notorious Alcatraz prison back into operation and block heavy criminals there in the future. The Republican announced on the Truth Social Platform that he instructs the responsible authorities to reopen an “enlarged and converted Alcatraz in order to accommodate America’s most unscrupulous and violent offenders”. Alcatraz should serve as a symbol of law and order. He did not give details for the ambitious project.

From 1934 to 1963 Alcatraz was the most feared prison in the United States. The rock island “The Rock” was considered to be a breakout – and as a ban on the ban on the “worst of the worst”. Here, gangster legends such as Al Capone had to serve their punishments under the sharpest conditions, but also unknown prisoners who were classified as particularly dangerous or violent or who were said to have a great risk of eruption.

Today the island is a museum and as a breeding ground for many birds. After the closure, Alcatraz also served as a Hollywood setting and became famous for gangster stories and adventure thrillers with film stars. The name is world famous.

Trump wrote that in the past the United States had not hesitated to keep the most dangerous criminals far away from all of them. “It should be the same. We will no longer tolerate these serial offenders, who spread dirt, bloodshed and chaos on our streets,” warned the 78-year-old and continued to write: “The reopening of Alcatraz will serve as a symbol of law, order and justice.”

According to the authority, which is responsible for federal prisons, only around 260 to 275 inmates have been housed in the Alcatraz prison over the years. The detention center has never reached its full capacity of 336 prisoners. In Alcatraz, fewer than one percent of all federal prisoners were imprisoned.

According to the authority, the reason for the closure was that “the operation of the facility was too expensive”. Alcatraz’s operation cost almost three times as much as that of any other federal prison. “The main costs were caused by the physical insulation of the island. This insulation meant that everything (food, supplies, water, fuel, etc.) had to be brought to Alcatraz by ship.” At that time, the federal government therefore decided that it was cheaper to build a new facility than to keep Alcatraz open.

Trump doesn’t seem to be such considerations. It is completely open how long a reconstruction of the detention center could take and how expensive it would be. The president should primarily be about the symbolism of the announcement. The Republican presents himself as a “law-and-order” man, who wants to clean up in the United States and ensure law and order. He tries to show hardness at all levels and relies on deterrence. The symbolic power is in the foreground, not the practicality of the suggestions.

Shortly after his inauguration, Trump had announced at the end of January to set up a large detention center for criminal migrants at the – also notorious – American military base Guantánamo Bay. He instructed the expansion of an existing and hardly known migrant facility. It is separated from the famous prison camp, which the United States had built in Guantánamo Bay after the attacks of September 11, 2001. However, Trump’s idea should have played as a deterrent message that Guantánamo is generally associated with hardness and draconian conditions of detention.

And it was Trump’s son Donald Junior, who, just after the announcement of the Guantánamo Plan, proposed to revive Alcatraz as a prison. “This is a great idea,” he wrote at the time with a view to the Guantánamo decision on the platform X. “Maybe we should also open Alcatraz again?!?!”

When asked by a reporter, how he got to the advance, the President himself said at the White House: “It’s just an idea that I had.” Alcatraz is “a symbol for whatever. I mean, it is a sad symbol, but it is a symbol of law and order”.