Donald Trump’s second term is certainly proving to be a fruitful one for anyone who wondered what it might be like if the Roman emperor Caligula – known for supposedly making his horse a senator – had social media.
In the last few days alone, the President has shared an image of himself as the next Pope, pledged to introduce a 100 per cent tariff on movies that shoot outside of America, and pledged to reopen America’s most infamous prison: Alcatraz.
The President says he is absolutely serious about reopening the prison, which sits on a small island – about 1,500ft by 500ft – off San Francisco, and which has been closed since 1963. The prison was notoriously America’s most secure, not least because the island is surrounded by strong currents (and cold water), making escape all but impossible.
Trump says he is “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”.
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Read MoreNeedless to say, the idea is a deeply bizarre one: Alcatraz was closed for a reason – several very good reasons, in fact. Despite its reputation, the prison was a small one and didn’t operate for very long – it opened in 1934 and was closed down in 1963 and housed fewer than 300 offenders.
Because it mostly housed notorious bank robbers – Al Capone, “Machine Gun” Kelly, and “Birdman of Alcatraz” Robert Franklin Stroud all called it home at some point – it held a much bigger place in the media, whether in news coverage or movie dramatisations, than it ever did as part of the practical prison system.
The main reasons Alcatraz was closed were cost and practicality – because it was on an island and absolutely everything had to be delivered by boat (and those boats had to be well-guarded against escape and smuggling attempts), it cost more than three times more per prisoner to run than the USA’s other federal prisons.
On top of that, the island buildings were already disintegrating in the 1960s, mostly thanks to salt water erosion, meaning that modern-day facilities that were safe – and while Trump may not care about the safety of inmates, guards and other staff will insist on such standards for their own sakes – would need to be built largely from scratch.
Then there is the problem of utilities. According to its historians, Alcatraz lacks plumbing and only has a partial electrical supply which would be entirely unfit for purpose in a modern facility. Trying to establish all of that would take years, quite probably longer than Trump’s presidential term – and all of that is just to try to reopen Alcatraz as a relatively small facility. Trump’s desire for it to be “substantially enlarged” is made difficult by the fact that Alcatraz is, after all, a very small island. That is the entire point of the facility.
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Read MoreAs if all of that wasn’t headache enough, there is also the small matter that Alcatraz is a national park – and that status is established by law, which cannot be overridden by a Trump executive order. Trump thinks that being President means that everything the government owns is his to do whatever he likes with, but he cannot simply turn a park into a prison – this is a mad plan that Congress would have to actually approve.
Even by the standards of Trump’s plans, reopening Alcatraz stands out as particularly stupid, but this doesn’t mean it is harmless. The plan is alarming in two ways. The first is simply that the man governing the most powerful country in the world, at a time of huge global challenges, is obsessing over the kind of plans an eight-year-old would dismiss as ridiculous.
The second is that Trump is fixated on being able to imprison people indefinitely, without restrictions like “due process” or “fair trials”, and without judges being able to stop him. As it is dawning on him that disappearing people to foreign jails for life – a sentence so horrifying it ought to be read twice – might not be as easy as he thought it would, he is looking for easy ways around that. As he flailed for the solution, he hit upon Alcatraz, and so it was ordered.
The odds of Alcatraz reopening as a working prison any time soon are surely miniscule. That doesn’t make Trump’s intent behind it any less alarming.
James Ball is the political editor of The New European
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