President Trump has asked Congress for $152 million to start work on restoring Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary. This almost has to be a joke.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Cuba and had to preface my remarks with an admission that, while I have read and studied Cuba extensively, I’d never traveled there. This week is a little different, as I’ve been to Alcatraz half a dozen times and I have met former inmates, guards, and even the children of guards who grew up on the island. I have a bookshelf full of texts about Alcatraz. In addition, I spent years maintaining aging hotels on Galveston Island which, while not a prison, certainly gave me some experience with aging concrete and plumbing in an ocean environment.
Let’s start with a very brief history. Formerly a military fort and prison, The United States Penitentiary Alcatraz opened August 11, 1934, and closed March 21, 1963. This was a small prison, housing on average just 275 of the most hardened and infamous of federal prisoners.
Alcatraz was never a very successful prison primarily because it's being an island a little of a mile off the coast of San Francisco, meant that the harsh climate made operating the prison a financial nightmare. There was not—and still is not—any direct connection to the mainland for water, electricity, or sewage, meaning everything had to be transferred by boat from the mainland. By the time the prison closed, the daily cost of keeping a single incarcerate prisoner on Alcatraz was more than three times higher than anywhere else in the rest of the federal penitentiary system. This was the primary reason the prison was closed, and is the primary reason it should never be reopened.
But, let’s ignore the operating cost. What would it cost to make that aging dinosaur of rust and crumbling concrete ready to reopen? First, let’s connect the utilities.
The National Park Service says water and diesel fuel still have to be ferried out, while garbage and sewage are carried back to shore, and the Bureau of Prisons says the old prison was closed in part because nearly one million gallons of fresh water had to be barged weekly to the island. Using recent Bay-area marine utility projects as rough comparisons, a submarine electric feeder to Alcatraz looks like roughly $5 million to $10 million, and a submarine water line looks more like $15 million to $50 million. Put less delicately, before a single inmate takes a shower, flushes a toilet, or turns on a light, you are probably staring at $25 million to $70 million just to stop running the place like an offshore camp with boats and generators.
If Washington seriously tried to resurrect Alcatraz as a prison, the environmental review alone would likely become its own island institution. Across federal agencies, the median time to complete an environmental impact statement is about 34 months, and even Alcatraz’s much narrower historic-preservation-and-safety program took the National Park Service from a draft EIS in March 2001 to a final EIS in October 2001 and a Record of Decision in 2002. On top of NEPA, Section 106 review would apply because this is a federal project affecting historic property, and because Alcatraz is a National Historic Landmark the agency must try to minimize harm and bring in additional consultation. The cheapest part of this circus would probably be the consultants: GAO says a “typical” EIS has been estimated at roughly $250,000 to $2 million, with DOE’s median EIS contractor cost at $1.4 million. In plain English, before the first prisoner got his commemorative iron cot, Uncle Sam could easily spend a few years and low-single-digit millions just producing the paperwork explaining why this was a terrible idea.
And let’s not forget about asbestos: Alcatraz is not some quaint old ruin sprinkled with a charming dusting of historical fibers. The National Park Service says structures on the island are assumed to contain asbestos and lead-based paint until proven otherwise. The problem is that there does not appear to be a clean public estimate for “remove all asbestos from Alcatraz and call me when it’s done.” There is a similar project already underway at Golden Gate Park, so using those numbers I’ll hazard a semi-educated guesstimate and say it will cost about $7 million to remove the asbestos enough that remodeling and repair can begin.
But wait, there is one more step! The buildings are almost a century old, and they need to be stabilized to prevent collapse from seismic activity. Here, we can use fairly precise numbers, since the National Park Service has just run the numbers to do exactly that. The cost is $63.584 million. Also already scheduled is a project to stabilize the island’s wharf at a cost of $40.2 million.
So now we are ready to start repairing those old cells, the reason we started this whole nonsense. Well, no. The old Alcatraz cells were 5’ by 9’, totaling 45 square feet in total. While there is no set national minimum cell size, numerous court challenges on the space necessary to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” have forced the Department of Justice to set detention standards for segregation call for at least 70 square feet total, with 35 square feet unencumbered by bunks or plumbing.
At this point, you should realize that none of the existing cells on Alcatraz meet any of these standards and the entire cell blocks would have to be rebuilt. And there are similar concerns about the kitchens, shower areas, and medical services meeting modern codes. By far the simplest solution would be to bulldoze down the site—ignoring that it is on the National Register for Historic Sites—and build a new prison. While we are somehow turning the small cells into large cells, we should go ahead and add in the HVAC, fire suppression, electronic controls, medical space, kitchens, staff areas, backup power, and marine security. I’ll skip all the back of the envelope figuring and just give you the bottom line. This is going to cost about $1.2 billion.
Which raises the rather obvious question: If you are going to have to build a new prison, why not build it someplace where the cost will be much cheaper?
If the goal is to make Alcatraz hold about 300 inmates again the honest number is not the White House’s $152 million first-year ask, but something more like a total rebuild cost of roughly $1.2 billion. In short, a little over a billion dollars buys you a boutique rock in the bay for 300 prisoners, which is an impressively inefficient way to do corrections.
By contrast, a brand-new 4,000-bed prison in the middle of nowhere Nevada would almost certainly be cheaper per inmate and might well cost about the same in total. One policy estimate based on recent prison construction put a 4,000-bed facility at about $500 million. So, the dark joke here is that for roughly the kind of money it could take to resurrect Alcatraz for 300 people, you could build two ordinary 4,000-bed mainland prisons with roads, utilities, and parking. We would also avoid about two decades of battles in California court followed by endless appeal in the 9th Circus. (But who in their right mind would want to do that???)
Clearly, Alcatraz will never again be a federal penitentiary. But, you should know that officials from both the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons have recently toured the island and are actively planning to proceed.
Couldn’t we just lock them up there now and save a lot of taxpayers money?
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