President Donald Trump says he orders his government to reopen and extend Alcatraz, the former notorious prison on a Californian island that has been difficult to reach for over 60 years.
In an article on his social site Truth on Sunday evening, Trump wrote that: “For too long, America was plagued by vicious, violent and repeated criminal offenders, the lie of society, which will never contribute anything other than misery and suffering. When we were a more serious nation, moreover, we could not block.
“This is why, today, I direct the Bureau of Prisons, with the Ministry of Justice, the FBI and internal security, to reopen a considerably enlarged and rebuilt Alcatraz, to house the most ruthless and violent holders of America”, he wrote, adding: “The reopening of Alcatraz will serve as symbol, order, order and justice”.
The prison – sadly inevitable because of the strong ocean currents and the water of the cold Pacific that surrounds it – was known as “The Rock” and housed some of the most notorious criminals in the country, including the Gangster Al Capone and George “Machine Gun”.
It has long been part of the cultural imagination and has been the subject of many films, including The rock With Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Still during the 29th years, he was open, 36 men attempted 14 distinct escapes, according to the FBI. Almost all were captured or did not survive the attempt.
The fate of three private detainees – John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris – is a debate and was dramatized in the 1979 film Escape Alcatraz With Clinton Eastwood.
The Alcatraz Island is now a major tourist site that operates by the National Parks Service and is an designated national reference point.
The closure of the federal prison in 1963 was awarded to ruined infrastructure and high costs of repair and supply of the island, because all from fuel to food was to be brought by boat.
A spokesperson for the prisons office said in a statement that the agency “would comply with all presidential orders”. The spokesperson did not immediately answer questions from the Associated Press concerning the practicality and feasibility of the reopening of Alcatraz or the role of the agency in the future of the former prison given the control of the National Park Service on the island.
The island serves as a real machine to revive at a revolted era of corrections. The Bureau of Prisons currently has 16 penitentiaries fulfilling the same high security functions as Alcatraz, including its maximum security facility in Florence, Colorado, and the American penitentiary on high land, ind., Which houses the Chamber of Federal Death.
The order comes as Trump clashed with the courts as he tries to send gang members accused to a notorious prison in Salvador, without regular procedure. Trump also ordered the opening of a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to contain up to 30,000 of what he labeled the “worst criminal foreigners”.
The prisons office has faced a myriad of crises in recent years and has been subjected to a meticulous examination after Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide in a federal prison in New York in 2019. An AP survey discovered deep and not reported faults in the Bureau of Prisons. The AP reports have disclosed a criminal activity generalized by employees, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and shortages of severe personnel who have hampered the responses to emergencies, including attacks and suicides.
AP’s investigation has also revealed rampant sexual abuses in a federal prison for women in Dublin, California. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law strengthening the agency’s surveillance after the AD reported its many faults
