Famous name aside, Alcatraz would make a terrible deportation jail

“The name of Napoleon,” said the French emperor Napoleon III, “is a program in itself.”The same is true of Alcatraz, or as President Trump put it in a Truth Social post announcing his intention to re-open the prison in San Francisco Bay, “ALCATRAZ.”In his post, Trump declared, “We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job,” and re-building Alcatraz “will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”Trump is given to exemplary displays of strength and toughness, so it’s no wonder that he’s drawn to America’s most theatrically forbidding penitentiary, with three major motion pictures and counting devoted to it.Say what you will about Leavenworth, Clint Eastwood has never starred in a movie about trying to escape from it. The problem is that Alcatraz has now been a tourist attraction for longer than it was a federal penitentiary, from 1934 to 1963. First the site of a fort in the 1850s, the island soon thereafter began to house military prisoners.The military eventually transferred over control of the facility to the Department of Justice for a prison that — in the spirit of Trump’s Truth Social post — was supposed to deal with the worst of the worst.Alcatraz got notorious gangsters like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly and the most incorrigible prisoners.The austere conditions and exacting routine were meant to bring to heel even the most disobedient inmates.As for escaping the island surrounded by the cold, hazardous waters of the Pacific, forget about it. It’s not true that it’s impossible to swim from Alcatraz to shore — the adventurous do the “Alcatraz swim” all the time — but it’s one thing to perform the feat as a well-trained athlete, another to do it as a desperate inmate who has been in confinement for years. During the course of the prison’s operation, 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts, all of which, as far as we know, failed.The sophisticated 1962 at...