Image by Bettina Nørgaard

Every once in a while, a headline floats across the internet promising that Alcatraz might reopen. Most recently, it’s come from Trump, who proposed turning the shuttered island prison back into a functioning one. The idea is as theatrical as it is empty. It’s exactly the kind of distraction our carceral system thrives on.

Alcatraz has always lived more in the American imagination than in our reality. It operated for just 29 years, and closed in 1963. it’s been a tourist destination ever since. It’s famous not because it worked, but because it didn’t.

To take Alcatraz back and turn it into an operational penitentiary, using the building that is there now, would make as much sense as taking Fort Sumter, putting it back together and arming it with missile loading cannons. – Alcatraz historian John Martini 

Reopening Alcatraz wouldn’t solve a single issue plaguing our criminal legal system. It wouldn’t fix the lack of mental health care. It wouldn’t provide jobs or housing or education. It wouldn’t decarcerate. It would just feed the myth that harsher punishment equals safety.

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Meanwhile, roughly two million people are already incarcerated in this country, scattered across more than 1,000 prisons, jails, and detention centers – many crumbling, overcrowded, or operating in violation of human rights.

If politicians want to get serious about incarceration, they don’t need to dust off the keys to a rock in the San Francisco Bay. They need to fund public defenders. They need to end cash bail. They need to stop criminalizing poverty, and addiction, and mental illness.

They need to listen to the people inside.

And while we’re talking about reclaiming Alcatraz, here’s some interesting history about who already did.

In 1969, a group of Native American activists from Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island. They lived there for 19 months in a peaceful protest, reclaiming the land in response to centuries of displacement, broken treaties, and erasure.

They didn’t come to punish. They came to remind this country of its promises, and its failures.

We don’t need more cages. We need more connection.
More compassion. More change.

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