Donald Trump has announced that he has ordered the rebuilding and reopening of Alcatraz Prison, the infamous federal prison located on a small island in California that was closed sixty years ago.

The prison will house "America's most ruthless and violent criminals," the American president wrote in Truth, adding that the prison will be "substantially expanded."

Also known as “The Rock,” the infamous prison is notorious for its location and the criminals who were incarcerated there.

It is located on an island in San Francisco Bay a couple of kilometers from the coast. It has been used as a military prison since 1861, during the Civil War, but in the last century it has entered the collective imagination, also thanks to films such as “Escape from Alcatraz” and “The Rock”.

In 1934 it was transformed into a maximum security prison that housed the most dangerous criminals: the gangster Al Capone, the serial killer Robert Franklin Stroud, George Kenny, a notorious robber and kidnapper. Three managed to escape from that prison: Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin, but they were thought to have drowned while trying to cross the bay.

Closed in 1963 due to high costs and obsolete facilities, since the 1970s it has become a tourist attraction visited by thousands of people a year. Doubts about its reopening concern the enormous investments needed for a prison that could not accommodate many inmates anyway. It was also closed because it was calculated that a prisoner there cost three times more than the cost in other US penitentiaries.

(Unioneonline/L)

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