President Trump mentioned on Sunday that he wished 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 the USA had turn into a harmful, lawless place, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he wished 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 might be put into motion, on condition that any such challenge could be terribly costly and that the administration already deliberate to chop billions of {dollars} from the Justice Division price range.
Mr. Trump mentioned he had instructed the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Division and the Homeland Safety Division to work on his thought, together with the F.B.I. — a curious alternative on condition that the bureau performs no function in incarcerating folks convicted of crimes.
A reopened Alcatraz, Mr. Trump wrote, would “function an emblem 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 well-liked museum attraction.
Along with holding the gangster referred to as “Machine Gun Kelly” and Al Capone — whose a number of indictments Mr. Trump typically 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 had 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. Right now, Alcatraz is finest referred to 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, known as Mr. Trump’s thought “absurd on its face” and the newest instance of what he known as the president’s “persevering with unhinged habits.”
A spokesman for Gov. Gavin Newsom laughed when requested concerning the president’s order. “Seems prefer it’s Distraction Day once more in Washington, D.C.,” Izzy Gardon, the governor’s director of communications, mentioned.
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 mentioned he needs to slash spending.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
