In an effort to bring America’s most infamous prison back into service, President Donald Trump is asking Congress for $152 million to reopen Alcatraz. The request was included in a 2027 fiscal year budget proposal, but it’s not the first time he has expressed interest in converting the island back into a maximum-security facility. The question remains, though: Is it worth it?
Alcatraz Reimagined
“REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!” said the president in May 2025, writing on X. Many on the left thought he was joking, even though the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Director William Marshall said he would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the President’s agenda.” Marshall even ordered an “immediate assessment to determine our needs and the next steps.” A couple of months later, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured the island. “Alcatraz could hold the worst of the worst,” Bondi told Fox News at the time. “It could hold anything.” Nothing much was heard about it again until now.
In the new budget proposal, the Trump administration seeks $5 billion for the BOP to improve the country’s “crumbling detention facilities.” Included in that is $152 million to make over the historic island, which would reportedly cover the first year of costs to “rebuild Alcatraz as a state-of-the-art secure prison facility.” Reopening and operating the site, however, would require significantly more money than that.
A source told Axios last year it could cost nearly $2 billion to transform the place into a supermax complex, which would likely require razing the dilapidated structures and building new ones. The president could also opt for a more scaled-back prison that wouldn’t occupy the entire island, costing about $1 billion, the source told Axios. Or the White House could auction the project to private contractors and let somebody else build and operate the property. Regardless of how it’s done, obstacles abound.
The Reality
The National Park Service has managed the island since 1973 and leads guided tours for approximately 1.5 million tourists annually; visitors spend nearly $60 million a year to see the historic site. Back in its heyday, some of the federal prison system’s most notorious criminals landed inside Alcatraz, including Chicago gangster Al Capone. It closed in 1963 because it was too costly to operate, roughly three times as expensive as any other prison. Food and water had to be ferried to the island, and waste had to be shipped out; meanwhile, the structures decayed in the bay’s saltwater environment. Since then, Alcatraz has essentially been frozen in time, deteriorating by the day.
Transforming the site would likely take years of construction and require an influx of funding and manpower. Former President Ronald Reagan considered reopening it in 1981, but the idea was ultimately rejected because the island lacked utilities and housed a maximum of only 336 inmates. We don’t know how many criminals a new facility would hold, but we do know it would require corrections officers and other employees to keep the place running, something many prisons in the United States already lack.
Staffing shortages have plagued the BOP for years, a situation exacerbated by corrections officers fleeing their jobs to join ICE. The bureau lost a net of more than 1,800 workers last year, according to ProPublica. “The BOP has long struggled to hire and retain enough workers to staff its facilities, where roughly 34,700 employees are responsible for more than 138,000 prisoners.” The staffing crisis has reportedly led to more violence and lockdowns. Some facilities are crumbling and fraught with corruption.
Does America even need another prison? The country already has a supermax in Colorado called ADX Florence, also known as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies,” where some of the federal system’s most serious and violent criminals (terrorists, spies, murderers, cartel bosses) are in solitary cells for 23 hours a day. Nobody has ever escaped. Former warden Robert Hood once called it a “clean version of hell.”
Overall, reopening Alcatraz might be a tough sell. It would certainly be a monument to Trump’s legacy if the project were successful, but it could also turn into a bloated boondoggle. The challenge, as always, is turning a dramatic idea into a workable one.
