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Trump Wants to Reopen Alcatraz! [1]
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Date: 2025-05-04
Trump really identifies with Al Capone:
Maybe that explains today’s announcement: Trump orders reopening of Alcatraz prison
President Trump said Sunday that he is ordering the reopening of the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, the historic prison offshore from San Francisco that closed more than 60 years ago. “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,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Alcatraz is where Al Capone was famously sent after he proved too incorrigible for the regular federal prisons. Alcatraz was intended for prisoners who continuously caused trouble at other federal prisons. It would be a "last resort prison", to hold the worst of the worst who had no hope of rehabilitation. It was considered escape-proof (and probably was, though three prisoners who went missing were never found).
Alcatraz was also very expensive to operate, so much so that the Bureau of Prisons closed it down in 1963. The US now has a “supermax” prison in Florence CO, and another one, including a death chamber, in Terre Haute IN. But “Alcatraz” is still a watchword for a place to house the worst of the worst. Maybe that’s why it appeals to Trump (I am pretty sure his identification with Capone does not extend to being locked up where Capone was, though given his mental state, one never knows). He looks tough by “throwing the miscreants into the hole of Alcatraz.”
Alcatraz is now part of the National Parks System, one of the elements of the Golden Gate NRA. It is a major San Francisco tourist attraction — I’ve taken friends there. That is probably one reason why Trump is targeting it. He wants to stick it to San Francisco, to the Bay Area, to California. Also, if he can take Alcatraz away from the NPS, he can do the same to the Presidio, which is also part of Golden Gate NRA, and which land developers have been having wet dreams about ever since the army decommissioned it. (We owe a great debt to Phil Burton, who had arranged decades earlier that if the army ever left the Presidio, it would become a national park. No one believed it would ever happen, and when it did, and developers discovered what Burton had done, the howls of anguish set operatic records.)
Though this be method, yet there’s madness in it.
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