Is Donald Trump’s plan to reopen Alcatraz as a realistic prison?

US President Donald Trump has doubled his proposal to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the once listed prison island in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay.

Alcatraz – popularly known as “The Rock” – has been closed for decades and is now a historic monument that is visited by millions of tourists every year.

The US president says he believes that the prison could ever be used to accommodate dangerous prisoners, and serves as a symbol of law and order in the US.

But experts say that refurbishing the expired remains of the once formidable prison “is not at all realistic”.

This is what we know about the plan.

Alcatraz is located on an island about 1.25 miles (2 km) from San Francisco and was originally built as a Navy defenseort, but was rebuilt in the early 20th century as a military prison.

In 1934 it was formally converted into a federal prison – Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary – Housing Northern prisoners, including Gangster Al Capone, Mickey Cohen and George “Machinegeweer” Kelly, among others.

At the time, the prison was one of the most notorious in the US and was considered inevitable because of the strong currents and cold temperatures of the bay of San Francisco.

The facility was also made famous by the 1979 film, the American biographical prison drama, escaped from Alcatraz, who told about a prisoner of 1962 with Clint Eastwood starring as leader Frank Morris.

It was also the site of the film The Rock, in the lead role Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, about a former SAS captain and FBI -Chemicus who saves hostages from Alcatraz Island.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, BOP, it was almost three times more expensive to operate than other federal institutions and it was finally closed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963.

The island and prison are now a museum that is managed by the National Park Service. More than 1.4 million people visit every year.

“Alcatraz is a place where the past meets the present,” said Christine Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in a statement sent to the BBC.

“It challenges us to listen, learn and continue the stories that still form our world today,” she added.

Donald Trump is not the first president to reopen the facility as a detention center.

In 1981, Alcatraz was one of the 14 locations that were considered by the Reagan administration to hold a maximum of 20,000 refugees who had fled Cuba to Florida in the famous “Mariel Boatlift”.

The site was ultimately rejected due to a complete lack of sufficient facilities and its value as a historical tourist site.

In a truth on May 4, Trump first said he had instructed his government to open and expand the prison of the island again, and said that “too long America is plagued by cruel, violent and repeated criminal perpetrators.”

Trump spoke with reporters in the White House the next day and said that according to him Alcatraz represents “something very powerful, very powerful” – law and order.

“We need law and order in this country,” he said. “So we’re going to look at it. Some people are going to work very hard on this.”

Although he said he finds the idea ‘interesting’, Trump also acknowledges that the prison is currently a “big hulk” that is “rust and rotting”.

“It represents something that is both terrible and beautiful and strong and strong and miserable,” he said.

Trump’s border Tsar, Tom Homan, also told reporters that Alcatraz could be “an option” for “significant threats of public safety and threats of national security”.

“It should be on the table,” he added.

Shortly after Trump’s comments made news all over the world, spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice Gilmartin said in a statement that BOP “works on rebuilding and opening Alcatraz to serve as a symbol of justice and order”.

But prison experts and historians have expressed serious doubts as to whether the plan is possible.

“To be honest, at first I thought it was a joke,” Hugh Hurwitz, who served as acting director of the BOP between May 2018 and August 2019, told the BBC. “It is not realistic to think that you can repair it. You should tear it up and start again.”

Hurwitz pointed to a number of problems with the facility, including buildings that “literally fall apart”, cells in which “a six-foot person cannot get up”.

“There are no security upgrades. No cameras. No screens,” he added. “You can’t run prison.”

“I have two words: water and waste water,” said Jolene Babyak, an author and Alcatraz historian who lived there for two Stints as a child with her father, a prison manager.

“In his heyday, all the waste water for 500 or more people was just dumped in the bay,” she said. “Nowadays it has to be scored. It is simply not realistic at all. But it records everyone’s imagination.”

When the facility was closed in 1963, the BOP said it was almost three times more expensive to operate Alcatraz than any other federal prison – the cost per head of the population is $ 10 and $ 13, compared to between $ 3 and $ 5 for other facilities. This was partly because the food and supplies required to be dropped off by boat.

In today’s federal prisons, the costs per head of the population are for prisoners between $ 120 and $ 164 – which means that the costs can rise to more than $ 500 per person in a facility such as Alcatraz, which could only keep around 340 prisoners at their peak.

“It was astonishingly expensive to keep a convicted person there,” said John Martini, a historian who spent a number of years on Alcatraz as a ranger at the National Park Service. “Things have not changed. But the place has gone downhill.”

“It is actually a shell. Even the concrete has major problems. The park service has millions in structural stabilization,” he added. “They would need water, electricity, heat and sanitary facilities. None of those functions.”

“This (the comments of Trump) are just a different turn in the strange history of Alcatraz,” Mr Martini added.