When President Trump recently said he wanted to reopen Alcatraz, to “lock up the most dangerous criminals and keep them far away from anyone they could harm,” it was hard to know how seriously to take him. The federal government already houses its worst offenders at a supermax prison near Florence, Colo. — the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — where Zacarias Moussaoui, El Chapo, Eric Rudolph and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are held in conditions far more brutal, isolating and inescapable than anything Alcatraz ever had to offer. One day later, the president doubled down, calling Alcatraz “the ultimate” in terms of being “very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order,” and referring to the movies about the place and the failed escapes: “It sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak, it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting.”
What he was trying to conjure, in his associative but effective way, is Alcatraz’s continuing hold on the American imagination, its force as a metaphor for a no-holds-barred, publicly retributive form of justice. Alcatraz was and remains as much an idea as a place. James V. Bennett, the director of the Bureau of Prisons for nearly the entirety of Alcatraz’s operation as a federal penitentiary, grasped the enduring symbolic power of the island from the start: “Always when I went to Alcatraz after that first [visit] in 1937,” he wrote years later, “it seemed to me that this was the place where the legend of the big house in the annals of crime would live the longest and die the hardest. Alcatraz was never without a sense of fantasy.”
“Fantasy” is a strange word to use in relation to a supermax prison, at the time supposedly the toughest ever built, but we understand it intuitively because many of us have participated in it. Anybody who has watched “Escape from Alcatraz,” or played the video games, or donned the headphones and shuffled through the cell house audio tour, has played a role in the collective maintenance and propagation of the fantasy that is Alcatraz: the most notorious criminals, the harshest conditions, the solid steel doors to the solitary cells, the dummy heads in the beds of those, immortalized in the movie, who escaped in 1962.
Mr. Trump’s plans remain unlikely. Beyond the prohibitive cost and decrepit infrastructure, the logistical complications alone are fatal. The island has no source of fresh water, and everything required to sustain life there, from food and water to fuel, has to be brought in by barge or boat. Those practical considerations aren’t what the president is talking about, when he floats the idea of bringing a 113-year-old prison back online to house the proverbial “worst of the worst.” What he’s talking about is the fantasy.
The now-iconic cell house, which sits atop steep island cliffs in the middle of San Francisco Bay, didn’t start out as a symbol of anything. The main building was built in the early 1900s to house an influx of military prisoners in the wake of the Spanish-American War; it was only after the Justice Department took it over in 1933 that people started talking about how “escape- proof” it could be. (The early military prisoners had no trouble breaking out of the building; two men escaped within months of its opening in 1912, never to be seen again, and others would follow.)
Amid a Prohibition-era surge in crime, the Department of Justice decided it needed a location to house the gangsters, bootleggers, kidnappers and escape artists that state and lower-rate federal penitentiaries couldn’t hold. Alcatraz wasn’t the ideal choice, as its limitations were clear, but money was tight in 1933. The building already existed, it could be retrofitted to enhance its security at a relatively low cost, and the notion of the forbidding “island prison” had a long and easily-summoned history in the public imagination.
