Alcatraz Island sits in a bay 2 kilometres off the coast of San Francisco and its infamous prison — which once housed notorious gangster Al Capone — has been closed for more than 60 years.
Since the penitentiary doors last slammed shut, the island and prison — nicknamed "The Rock" — has been converted into one of the country's most popular tourist destinations, highlighting a chequered past coloured with stories of stunning escape attempts, claims of ghost encounters and the antics of bizarre and dangerous prisoners.
Now US President Donald Trump wants the island reopened and rebuilt as part of his administration's push to crack down on violent crime, and the plan has already drawn criticism from political opponents who say the idea is illogical.
Why does Trump want to reopen Alcatraz?
In a post to his Truth Social platform on Sunday, local time, Mr Trump signalled he has directed the US Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigations and Homeland Security to rebuild a "substantially enlarged" Alcatraz "to house America's most ruthless and violent Offenders".
"When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm," Mr Trump said in his post.
"We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally."
Speaking to reporters on the lawn of the White House, the president later said that part of the motivation for reopening Alcatraz was to respond to judges who "want to have trials for every single person that's in our country illegally".
"That would mean millions of trials, it's just so ridiculous, what's happening," he said.
"It's long been a symbol … it's a sad symbol, but it's a symbol of law and order. It's got quite a history, frankly."
The order comes as Mr Trump has been clashing with the courts as he tries to send accused gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, without due process.
The president has also floated the idea of sending some federal US prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Center — known as CECOT — and directed the opening of a detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 of what he has labelled the "worst criminal aliens".
What is Alcatraz?
Alcatraz prison — infamously inescapable due to the strong ocean currents and cold Pacific waters that surround it — housed some of the nation's most dangerous criminals, including gangster Capone and George "Machine Gun" Kelly.
The island's name was first coined by a Spanish explorer in 1775 with the word "Alcatraces", which typically translates to "pelican" or "strange bird", according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
During the 1850s the island was used as a US military reservation and by the mid-1930s it had been turned into a "maximum-security, minimum-privilege" jail for the country's worst offenders, the bureau says.
The jail only ever housed an average of between 260 and 275 inmates, which was always less than 1 per cent of the US's total federal prison population, but among them were serious criminals and gangsters such as Alvin Karpis — who was the country's first-ever "Public Enemy Number One".
After 29 years of operation, Alcatraz prison had grown too expensive to keep open due to estimated restoration and maintenance costs of up to $US5 million ($7.7 million). In 1963, it closed and was largely abandoned.
What is Alcatraz used for now?
For nine years, Alcatraz island sat mostly unused until the US Congress under president Richard Nixon created the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and incorporated the island into the country's National Park Service.
In 1973 it opened as a tourist attraction and has continued to operate that way ever since, with more than 1 million visitors from around the world crossing the San Francisco Bay by ferry each year to take a look.
The island also continues to serve as a veritable time machine to a bygone era of US corrections.
The Bureau of Prisons currently has 16 penitentiaries performing the same high-security functions as Alcatraz, including its maximum security facility in Florence, Colorado, and the US penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, which is home to the federal death chamber.
What are the most notable Alcatraz escape attempts?
Alcatraz was billed as America's most secure prison due to its isolated location and no successful escapes were ever officially recorded, although five prisoners are still listed as "missing and presumed drowned".
The Federal Bureau of Prisons says in the 29 years the island was operational, 36 men were involved in 14 separate escape attempts. Twenty-three of them were caught, six others were shot and killed.
Among those attempts was an effort by prisoners Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe on December 16, 1937, that occurred after the duo filed through iron bars on the window of the prison's mat shop.
The prisons bureau says they escaped into San Francisco Bay during a bad storm and were likely swept to their deaths at sea.
In 1945 another prisoner, John Giles, took advantage of his prison job unloading laundry at the loading dock to steal an entire army uniform.
He managed to walk undetected onto an army barge that he thought was heading back to San Francisco. It wasn't — it was destined north for Angel Island, where Giles was met by prison officers who returned him to Alcatraz.
Perhaps the most high-profile escape attempt occurred in 1962, and involved inmates John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris. They vanished from their cells and are widely believed to have used homemade drills to enlarge vent openings, placed fake segments in walls and dummy heads in their beds fit with human hair to disguise their escape.
The prisons bureau says it is believed they used building pipes to climb to their freedom, before escaping with vests and a raft fashioned from prison-issued raincoats, but the escape is of some debate and was dramatised in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood.
The island has also long been a focus of US cultural imagination, which included the release of various other films such as The Rock starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Will Trump actually be able to reopen Alcatraz prison?
According to former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, the answer is a resounding "no". The California Democrat quickly questioned the feasibility of Mr Trump's idea.
A spokesperson for the prisons bureau said in a statement that the agency "will comply with all Presidential Orders".
The spokesperson did not immediately answer questions from The Associated Press regarding the practicality and feasibility of reopening Alcatraz or the agency's role in the future of the former prison given the National Park Service's control of the island.
If Mr Trump is to go to ahead with Alcatraz's reopening, he would need to find large sums of federal money to bankroll his plans to substantially rebuild the island.
While it closed in the 60s due to up-keep costs, it was also almost three-times more expensive to keep open then than any other federal prison because supplies all had to be shipped to Alcatraz by boat.
ABC/wires
