“The name of Napoleon,” said the French emperor Napoleon III, “is a program in itself.”

The same is true of Alcatraz, or as President Donald Trump put it in a Truth Social post announcing his intention to re-open the prison in San Francisco Bay, ALCATRAZ.

In his post, Trump declared, “We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job,” and re-building Alcatraz “will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”

Trump is given to exemplary displays of strength and toughness, so it’s no wonder that he’s drawn to America’s most theatrically forbidding penitentiary, with three major motion pictures and counting devoted to it. Say what you will about Leavenworth, Clint Eastwood has never starred in a movie about trying to escape from it.

The problem is that Alcatraz has now been a tourist attraction for longer than it was a federal penitentiary, from 1934-1963.

First the site of a fort in the 1850s, the island soon thereafter began to house military prisoners. The military eventually transferred over control of the facility to the Department of Justice for a prison that – in the spirit of Trump’s Truth Social post – was supposed to deal with the worst of the worst.

Alcatraz got notorious gangsters like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly and the most incorrigible prisoners. The austere conditions and exacting routine were meant to bring to heel even the most disobedient inmates. As for escaping the island surrounded by the cold, hazardous waters of the Pacific, forget about it.

It’s not true that it’s impossible to swim from Alcatraz to shore – the adventurous do the “Alcatraz swim” all the time – but it’s one thing to perform the feat as a well-trained athlete, another to do it as a desperate inmate who has been in confinement for years.

During the course of the prison’s operation, 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts, all of which, as far as we know, failed. The sophisticated 1962 attempt by Frank Morris (played by Eastwood) and John and Clarence Anglin got the men in the water. In all likelihood, they didn’t make it out, although their bodies were never discovered.

Alcatraz closed because it needed extensive refurbishing and was expensive to maintain. Supplies had to be brought out by boat, including 1 million gallons of water by barge a week, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

Since 1986, the island has been a National Historic Landmark that 1.2 million people visit a year. No one in the area is going to want to give up that appealing cash cow for a real penitentiary, and the legal obstacles and expense of a reconversion would be considerable. The Border Wall with Mexico would probably be completed sooner.

It’s not as though we don’t have fearsome prisons anymore. The ADX Florence, or the supermax in Florence, Colorado, is known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies for a reason. Inmates are isolated and the security measures are harrowingly robust, coming as close to total control as is humanly possible. The drug kingpin El Chapo is held there, and he’s never getting out.

If we don’t need a showy new name-brand prison to demonstrate to offenders that we mean business, we do need more jail space. Counter to the misguided contentions of the decarceration movement, the best way to protect society from criminals is to imprison them. As Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute points out, we should be building new prisons that are modern and, ideally, relatively small. This creates more humane conditions and allows for authorities to experiment with what prison settings and policies work best.

Alcatraz is never going to lose its fascination, and the mythology around the facility is part of American lore. That doesn’t mean that we need to devote scarce resources to the difficult task of bringing it back online, when new, less famous jails would suffice.

© 2025 by King Features Syndicate