“Access to Alcatraz Island is via commercial ferry service. For ticket reservation call (415) 981-ROCK [415.981.7625] or go to www.alcatrazcitycruises.com. Once on the island you can stay as long as you wish up to the last ferry, which changes seasonally. Alcatraz is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day. Be aware that Alcatraz often sells out in advance. In summer and around holidays tickets can sell out a month or more in advance. Tickets go on sale 90 days in advance,” says the US National Park Service’s “Plan Your Visit” page on its website for Alcatraz, the notorious former maximum security prison in San Francisco Bay that held inmates until Attorney General Robert F Kennedy ordered it closed in 1963 and has since been converted into a museum.
The fact that the website is still functioning and the island itself appears to still be open for visitors as of Monday seems in tension with the directives of the presidential administration in which Robert F Kennedy Jr serves. For example, the BBC’s article headlined “Trump orders reopening of notorious Alcatraz prison,” characterizes the president’s Sunday Truth Social post expressing his intent to convert the island back to a federal prison as having had immediate effect. As such Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum should have at the very least already taken the website down and begun the paperwork necessary to transfer legal ownership of the island from the National Park Service back to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons to allow them to begin the preliminary assessments on what work is required to bring the facility back online after 62 years of disuse.
That evidently no such actions have yet occurred could indicate that the president was not actually serious or, more likely, that if he had been serious he’s instead getting distracted by something else and will within days forget that he had ever expressed any such intent to reopen Alcatraz.
To ditch the tedious sarcasm for a minute, this new circlejerk is so on-brand for the fat fuck. Just like with sending deportees to “Gitmo” and invoking the “Alien Enemies Act,” Trump simply likes the idea of reopening Alcatraz because it sounds badass and foreboding, not because there’s any real practical reason when it can be done through other means and methods. There’s already a fucking nightmarish ultramax federal prison in Colorado called ADX Florence that’s basically the real-life Arkham Asylum given the notoriety of the supervillains incarcerated there (or were incarcerated there until they died decades after the last time they glimpsed so much as a tree with their own eyes). More importantly it’s that simply posting a bullshit fantasy about reopening Alcatraz as a prison – which will still take years and billions of dollars before the first convict is deloused there – is easier than actually doing the hard work of enacting policies that will reduce the “horrific national crime wave” that supposedly got so out of control during the Biden Administration.
As if on cue, here’s some minion lierally invoking Guantanamo as “symbolism” on Fox News Monday.