Alcatraz - Tourist Trap or next Guantanamo?

I put this is GD simply because the topic of closing Gitmo is so political, but this is really a poll. I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning and they were talking about closing Gitmo and what they were going to do with the detainees. One option quickly stated was reopening Alcatraz and putting some of the detainees there.

In my opinion, Alcatraz is so big, almost too big to house them. I don’t know the current census of prisoners but it’s not in the thousands. I also don’t think they should be pawned off on the Europeans. It’s a tough decision, but rotting in American prisons doesn’t seem all that bad to me for these men.

Enemy combatants, prisoners of war whichever label you prefer for these guys -maybe should not be intermixed with American felons. Maybe they should be relegated to military prisons but should alcatraz be turned into one of them?

It’s an interesting scenerio, what do you think should happen?

That sure seems silly to me. First of all, it seems like it would be a better solution to just put them in one of those Supermax profit centers somewhere than to spend the effort to rehab Alcatraz. They’d have to take it out of the hands of the National Park Service, forget about the wildlife stuff that’s there, etc., plus the buildings themselves are decrepit, yet historic.

I would think the cost to renovate Alcatraz to suit the needs of the military would be cost prohibitive.

Odesio

Perhaps this is a myth, but isn’t there a hierarchy of rules to government spending?

1st rule of government spending - why build one when you can have two - Carl Sagan from Contact.

Illustrating that spending on rehabing alcatraz would not be a problem. In reality, I’m sure it would be an issue and would only be one criteria in keeping the gov’t from using the facility.

I’m not the most news-aware guy in the world, so there are some things here I’m not clear on.

Are all of the people we’re talking about convicted criminals? If so, they should go to a prison. Last I heard, we have prisons.

Are some of them still on trial? They traditionally go in jails. Again, jails we have.

Are some of them suspects, but we don’t know what to charge them with, so we’re just sitting on them? Dude, it’s been seven years. If we got no facts, release them.

In the case of Alcatraz, is there some magical thing about putting them on an island? Yes, it’s hard to survive an escape from Alcatraz. It’s been done, though.

It’s also hard to survive an escape from any maximum security prison. There’s a reason why we don’t have all of our prisons on islands. It’s possible to make ones that work on land, and, as indicated above, we already have a few.

I don’t think Native Americans would like this plan…

Occupation of Alcatraz - Wikipedia

Alcatraz isn’t suitable to house prisoners- it’s in terrible shape. Cute idea but only if you’ve been drinking. :wink:

I thought the whole point of holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo was it’s ambiguous legal status: it’s held under a lease from a now-extinct government, which the current government of Cuba refuses to recognize the legitimacy of but doesn’t dare to contest by force. So it’s under US control but is not considered “US territory”. If the prisoners were on bona fide US soil, the power of the government to detain them indefinitely would come under attack from habeus corpus.

Right, they’d have to completely re-build it.

“Alcatraz” sounds as though it’d stir up a lot of negative emotion (and thusly protest) based on myth alone. The government would be better off sticking them in some Supermax prison most of the nation has never heard of and has little opinion on either way.

Was another option putting them on a rocket ship and sending them to the moon?

Alcatraz is falling apart. Well, perhaps not literally, but they’d have to raze everything and rebuild in one of the most difficult and expensive bits of land around. Why would they do that when they could just build a big concrete box outside Fresno or something?

Seriously, whoever suggested this seriously should’ve been politely invited off the program at the next commercial.

The suggestion was made by retiring Sen. Kit Bond (R., Mo.), who must know Alcatraz is in Nancy Pelosi’s district. Don’t take it at face value.

More realistically, people here are worried that they’d come to the Charleston Naval Brig. There’s only, like, 250 people in Guantanamo - we’re not talking about thousands of bodies to put places.

This is what I don’t get. Does the brig have a history of murderers escaping or something?

I would not want to see anything done to Alcatraz, it’s really, at least to me, a historical site and it’s fascinating to visit. It is very cool to see it and to visualize how prisoners once had to live.

The argument against putting the G’tmo detainees in regular prisons, whether convicted or not is simple. Prisons do not reform. Ask anyone who is a criminal and they will tell you all they learned in jail is how to become a BETTER criminal.

So if you allow these “radicals” to mix you might find them becoming Americanize or you could find them winning American criminals over to our side.

The other thing is even SuperMax prisons the prisoners still can pretty much get anything in. At the SuperMax in Colorado, prisoners had little trouble smuggling things in, passing messages and even running gangs.

Yeah, there’s a really stupid article in the paper today. Seriously, you’re fine with a regular prison, but furrin prisoners are a danger to us?

The media have a history of being incredibly incredulous, even when what’s going on is clear:

Okay, political dig scored, nothing to see here, move along. But to assume the media can ignore something that has a catchy sound to it would be to assume too much. How much ink has been spilled over that ho girl “auctioning her virginity off?” Instead of saying, oh, this story comes up every six months, it’s invariably bogus attention whoring, let’s not give it front page coverage, every outlet in the land will fall for it, every six months.

Alcatraz looks (from my float-by) crumbly and rusty. And, I sure don’t want to give that primo view to a bunch of goat herders. And, I suspect that Alcatraz, like many old buildings, is hardly as escape-proof as its reputation. I remember reading about Colditz Castle, the “inescapable high security” German POW redoubt. The most notable thing I remember is just how riddled with bricked over wine cellars, convenient drainage tunnels, easily-accessible crawl spaces, and other escape-friendly features it seemed to be. I’d imagine “treacherous San Francisco Bay” might prove, too, less than insuperable, given that they swim triathlons there and that high speed power boats work a little better than wooden rowboats.

Silly story.

Which you can’t do much of on Alcatraz island – I think I recall reading that the water supply for the island is no longer working, due to years of neglect.