Another bird-brained idea from Donald Trump

President Donald Trump’s latest fantastic notion is to repurpose Alcatraz Island, one of the National Park Service’s most popular historical sites, as the remote, isolated California prison it used to be. Nothing about it makes sense, according to the Tribune News Service.

It was costing nearly three times as much to operate as other federal prisons, which is why Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy made the sensible decision to close it in 1963.

Every necessity, such as fuel, food and water, had to be barged in. The buildings, visibly crumbling in the salty environment of San Francisco Bay, needed major repairs. Contrary to legend, it wasn’t escape-proof, either.

The $151 million that Trump is asking Congress to squander on Alcatraz would barely begin to restore it as a prison. The operating expenses would be as extreme as before, if not more so. But at least he’s asking Congress, rather than acting by imperial fiat like he did by destroying the White House’s East Wing for a grotesquely oversized monument to bad taste.

Congress should say no. What’s most interesting about his Alcatraz fantasy is how it displays Trump’s obsessions with symbolism and cruelty. He has written of it as a “symbol of law, order and JUSTICE.” What he means is punishment as hard as possible, at least for the criminals he doesn’t see fit to pardon.

Trump was clearly under the impression that no one had ever escaped from Alcatraz. That’s debatable. Over 29 years, according to the Bureau of Prisons, 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes. Five of them are still listed as “missing and presumed drowned.” Although San Francisco Bay is cold, the fitness icon Jack La Lanne once swam to the island pulling a rowboat, and several children also made the swim.

It would disappoint Trump to know there are no man-eating sharks.

The Clint Eastwood movie “Escape from Alcatraz,” which may be all Trump knows about the subject, depicts the 1962 escape of three men who broke out of the main cellblock and vaulted a fence to the water without being seen. The FBI closed that case after 17 years, believing they had drowned, but it’s still on the active books of the US Marshals Service. The Bureau of Prisons has a super-maximum facility in Florence, Colo., that’s far tougher than Alcatraz ever was.

Inmates, including the Mexican drug czar and escape artist known as El Chapo, spend 23 hours a day in a cell roughly the size of a parking place. Their only view of the outside world is a patch of sky seen through a window four inches wide.

It’s an escape deterrent designed to keep them from knowing even what wing of the prison they’re in. Robert Hanssen, the Soviet spy in the FBI who’s still considered the nation’s worst-ever security breach, was at ADX Colorado for 21 years until his death three years ago.

The Colorado supermax, nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” should satisfy anyone’s thirst for harsh punishment. As one former warden described it, “We’ve figured out a system that’s far beyond death.” But in Trump’s mind, the public apparently needs to see something that’s more symbolic than an out-of-the way complex in remote Colorado.

As far as the public seems to be concerned, Alcatraz is perfectly fine as a historical site. Some 1.4 million people visit it every year, many of them foreign tourists, and San Francisco is aghast at the prospect of losing that revenue stream to Trump’s whims. The scheme is far enough along that Pam Bondi visited the island with Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, whose department owns it now. (This was before Trump fired Bondi as attorney general.)

Alcatraz began as a military fortress and lighthouse, then became a military prison, converted to civilian use in 1933. It had become a white elephant by 1962, the year the Burt Lancaster movie “Birdman of Alcatraz” was nominated for Academy Awards.