The dude is stupid. You could open 10 (or more) new prisons for the cost of refurbishing the crumbling ruin that is Alcatraz. Then there are the operational costs which would follow about the same ratio.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
245 points (96.2% liked)
News
29216 readers
4351 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Wasn't one alleged point of DOGE was to reduce government waste? Alcatraz was closed due to it being a ridiculously expensive prison. Much more than any other prison at the time.
It was this, not the famous escape of 1963 that caused it to close.
Congratulations to Brainrot for defeating Humanity
the insects turn is coming up. Probably sooner than we think. Thats if the AI doesnt get them first.
You're all missing the point here:
California isn't giving proper respect, they have to be taught a lesson.
So, end the global film industry, put a nightmare prison right in sf bay, and just gradually make it clear they can't ignore Trump and pretend he doesn't exist.
Sounds good to be flooded with fewer American films and series at least.
Alcatraz was originally closed because it was extraordinarily expensive to run and it wasn't very useful given the alternatives.
"you had me at extraordinarily expensive" DJT
Sounds like Trump.
He's fucking demented. Like literally and medically.
As long as we put him in it I'm fine with that
I'm tired of just seeing random Trump ideas without any kind of deeper thought or plan behind it. Alcatraz hasn't housed a prisoner for a long time. Needless to say, it'd cost a lot of money to get it back up in action. Is this money worth spending? How much is it? What's wrong with our other supermax prisons in the USA?
It's embarrassing this guy can just throw out these off the cuff ideas and STILL finds fans in the USA.
He has an epiphany on the shitter and now we all suffer.
Alcatraz closed as a federal prison in 1963 after just 29 years of operation because it was too expensive to continue, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The per-capita cost of housing prisoners there was substantially higher than other correctional facilities. In addition, corrosion from the salt air of San Francisco Bay means the facility requires additional maintenance to sustain that prisons in other locations don’t.
I thought we were trying to save money
Fascism 101: never take fascists at their word. Pointing out hypocrisy is meaningless because they never meant it in the first place.
Yeah, but he also want to put in jail everyone that disagrees with him so they need somewhere to place them.
Something to waste time discussing that is not devoted to more important things...
Things that won't happen.
The salt from the ocean has corroded the bars, a good kick likely would open the windows. To secure the place would take years of rework or just outright tear down and rebuild.
The place hasn't had proper upkeep since the late 1960s and honestly very likely before then too. It wouldn't serve to secure anyone that various places out in the Midwestern desert regions wouldn't do multiple times better.
Alcatraz is a derelict. Getting it up to a functioning prison standard would almost assuredly take knocking it down with heavy equipment and starting over from zero. You could probably, unironically, finish high speed rail for the same time and financial cost, but then you couldn't try to impress people by showing everyone that you're the world's only banana republic dictator with no drip.
You're assuming Trump cares if it's up to code. He doesn't
I'm not sure if you took my meaning. Alcatraz is inoperable. If we moved to cars as a metaphor, we're not talking about "it can't pass smog", we're talking about "Boomer's fixer upper that's been untouched in the front yard for forty years and is basically unusable as even scrap metal".
Make rail drip again
Also, you can't build prisons on national parks.
Why? Cause it is against the law?
load more comments
(1 replies)
You think they won't give out a contract worth tens of millions to update a math balled prison to someone they know?
This is America.
millions
B
I think your "b" broke and fell over backwards, but I brought you a new one.
Pretty sure that’s the entire point of this whole thing. Give an insanely overbid contract to someone who will then launder back a sizable portion of it in campaign donations or crypto meme coin purchases. Continue grift until the money runs out.
The strength of the bars was never Alcatraz's selling point. It's the location.
Well the bars kind of need to have a particular bit of strength to prevent prisoners from taking over the place.
This is still about the location, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s near Hollywood so movies were made about it and it’s the next most notorious American prison after Guantanamo that Trump has heard of. I guarantee this is his Plan B after Guantanamo didn’t work out.
The prison camp isn't where they want to hold them. It's the Guantanamo Bay's Migrant Operations Center where they want to hold them. It suffers the same issues at Alcatraz, so either way they want to slice the bread here, they have to go through a set of hoops to get it to any kind of position to hold long term prisoners.
Someone go jingle your keys in front of the orange dunce...
He must have saw something on arcatraz lately and his stupid addled brain got stuck on it. Good god I hate this timeline.
Story from The Independent on May 5:
Trump announced Alcatraz reopening just hours after 'Escape from Alcatraz' aired on a South Florida PBS station
The 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood about the daring 1962 escape attempt aired on the local PBS channel just six hours before the president made his demand that the prison be reopened
arcatraz
Found the WoW nerd
He probably saw part of "The Rock" while flipping through the channels.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Nothing meaningful will happen with this during Trump's lifetime.
Time for the next dead cat.
COD players to Tom Crooks
"They're trying to build a prison!"
"For you and me to live in!"
"They're trying to build a prison!"
"FOR YOU AND ME!"
This prison was made for you and me 🎶
Everyone needs to stop reporting on anything he just says. Instead, the media should exclusively focus on what he actually does. Did he issue any executive order about it? Did he instruct congress to do anything anything about it? No? Then I don't give a shit, and neither should anyone else.
I'd rather fight back before he actually takes the action.
But 95% of the time he doesn't take any action on what he says.
Then he actually does take action on things he never said anything about.
If you fight back against everything he says, you'll exhaust yourself on so many things that don't matter; You'll completely miss many things that do. Which is in fact the strategy.
For example his personal crypto tokens. He never said anything about making his own tokens to launder bribes through. Then suddenly surprised everyone announcing a new company and tokens. If anyone in the world buys $25M worth, they'll get a private sit down dinner to discuss whatever they want. That blatant clear corruption is important. And bullshit this is just a distraction.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Fucking LOL. He obviously has never been there.
Are we going to send VX gas?
Cheaper to just build one in west Texas.
Cheaper and just as cruel to just bus them to West Texas.
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›