Dvir Yogev is a postdoctoral researcher at the Criminal Law & Justice Center at UC Berkeley. His research on public opinion and criminal justice reform has appeared in Criminology (2026) and Public Opinion Quarterly (2026).
Alcatraz has never stopped doing what it does best: colonizing the American imagination. The island is a ruin, a museum, a tourist destination, a historical shrine. But it is also a screen onto which Americans keep projecting fantasies of power.
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Last year, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur floated the idea of erecting a 450-foot statue of Prometheus on the island. It was not a government proposal, and there was no reason to think it would be built. Still, the notion made a certain kind of sense. Alcatraz invites grandiose nonsense. It makes people want to put something enormous, punitive or mythic in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
The White House's plan to reopen the prison – announced in early April – belongs to the same symbolic tradition, only with a federal budget line. The administration has asked Congress for $152 million as the first installment on a proposal to turn Alcatraz back into "a state-of-the-art secure prison facility." As policy, the idea is hard to defend. As imagery, it is perfect: the most famous prison in America, restored for an age of public anxiety.
The problem is that the federal government already has a modern Alcatraz. It is in Florence, Colo. Nobody had to build a dock to get there.
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons' "supermax" U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence is designed for inmates who pose the greatest risks to staff, other prisoners and the public. Reopening Alcatraz would not fill a missing carceral role. It would revive a symbol of extreme confinement.
And this symbol would be ruinously expensive. Operating a prison on Alcatraz makes every ordinary correctional function into a massive logistics problem. Guards, food, fuel, medical transfers, maintenance crews, construction materials, emergency repairs: All of it would have to cross the bay. The island has no natural water supply. Its infrastructure sits in corrosive salt air. Even in its current life as a popular historic site (it generates $60 million in tourism fees annually), Alcatraz is costly to maintain. The National Park Service is already spending more than $36 million to repair and seismically strengthen the island’s wharf just to keep visitors, staff and supplies moving safely.
Oscar Garza
The Prison Bureau's own history of Alcatraz explains why the penitentiary closed in 1963: It was too expensive to keep open. “In 1959 the daily per capita cost at Alcatraz was $10.10, compared with $3.00 at USP Atlanta” and “nearly one million gallons of water had to be barged to the island each week.” That was before modern seismic requirements, contemporary labor costs, current environmental regulations and the security infrastructure a reopened prison would now demand. The real issue is not the first $152 million. It is the permanent Alcatraz “tax.”
That tax would be easier to justify if American prison policy were moving in the direction of more supermaxes. It is not.
California has closed three prisons, ended its lease on the California City Correctional Facility, in Kern County, and plans to close the California Rehabilitation Center, in Riverside County, by fall 2026. The state Legislative Analyst's Office says recent prison-capacity reductions already produce about $1 billion in annual general fund savings. On this point, the politics are less exotic than the island itself. Voters want public safety, but they are also sensitive to waste. They demand accountability for crimes committed, as my research has shown, but the most theatrical punishment available is not the preferred response to that demand.
The literature on "penal populism" – exploiting public fear through harsh sentencing in order to win votes – has long recognized that distinction. Public punitiveness in the United States peaked in the 1990s and has mostly declined since. Rachel Barkow's "Prisoners of Politics" argues that emotional, "tough on crime" rhetoric loses its power, and support for harsh punishment weakens, when voters are forced to confront the high costs and limited public-safety payoffs of mass incarceration. The conservative Right on Crime movement found traction not by soft-pedaling crime, but by treating endless prison spending as unserious governance. However one frames it ideologically, rebuilding Alcatraz is an extravagant way to purchase an image of control.
Mariel Garza
The irony is that the island already tells a richer story than the prison revivalists seem to notice. The National Park Service presents Alcatraz not simply as a curiosity or a relic but as a place where visitors confront the history of incarceration and its costs. In its exhibit “The Big Lockup,” the agency places the prison in the long arc of mass incarceration and asks whether there is a better way.
Then there is the story that changed the island’s identity most dramatically. From November 1969 to June 1971, Native American activists occupied Alcatraz for 19 months under the banner "Indians of All Tribes." The National Park Service now describes that occupation as having helped ignite the movement for American Indian self-determination. By reclaiming a fortress built for captivity, the activists inverted its very purpose, transforming a monument of federal punishment into an enduring symbol of Indigenous freedom. It became, too, a place associated with protest, sovereignty and refusal.
That is why reopening Alcatraz as a prison would mean more than repurposing federal property. It would amount to a decision about which national symbols deserve public money and political energy. The Prometheus statue was absurd because it treated the island as a pedestal for fantasy. A rebuilt prison would make the same mistake in a grimmer register. It would once again use Alcatraz as a stage set for power, even though the country already has the prison capacity it needs and the island itself has become more valuable as a warning – and as a testament to liberation – than as an institution.
Alcatraz should remain what it is now: a reminder of what punishment looks like when spectacle outruns sense.
Paul Thornton
Mariel Garza
