We've had some threads on this topic in the distant past but I was curious since I live vaguely near it and am fascinated by its history.
In brief, what it says on the tin. Alcatraz was closed mainly due to the cost of running the place and the opposition of RFK when he was Attorney General. There are, however, ways that the cost could have been substantially mitigated. If a desalinization plant had been built on the island in the 1950s, maybe as part of the Eisenhower administration's infrastructure projects, it would have reduced costs by a lot. Moving the families of guards off the island also probably would have been helpful; the ferry to and from the island had to make like 20 runs a day just so people could go to and from work, school, errands, etc. and bringing in resources to support all those people added to the expense.
My idea for a POD is this: Frank Morris, the mover and shaker behind the infamous 1962 escape, started serving his sentence IOTL 1956 when he was arrested for bank robbery and given a fourteen year sentence. What if when he was first arrested (I'm sure he would have been held in a regular jail first) he was able to attempt an escape due to some perceived breach, but that effort failed, resulting in him being sent straight to Alcatraz upon conviction/guilty plea. IOTL he only ended up there in the early 1960s, so the whole timeline is moved forward and he executes a roughly similar escape attempt in premise to the 1962 one but is caught again while in the bay. This is all happens in 1957-58, but under the Eisenhower administration which had a much friendlier attitude to keeping the prison open. As a result of the escape, the DOJ makes an assessment of conditions at the prison and decides to renovate it to fix the concrete deterioration and add a desal plant while taking other money-saving measures to make it more cost effective. This investment and no 1962 escape keeps the place open through the RFK years and beyond. In the 1970s and 1980s when there is a gigantic increase in violent crime and politicians embrace tough on crime rhetoric, Alcatraz becomes an emblem of a tough correctional approach, and no one wants to close it for fear of being labeled weak on crime. Some changes are made during this period...greater paranoia about criminals and the need for more prison space leads to the families being moved off the island and the family quarters and communal buildings being bulldozed to build a Secure Housing Unit of the sort standard at all modern prisons. Politicians not wanting to touch the idea of tearing it down could keep it open well into the 2000s, maybe until close to the modern day. I think this all plausible; McNeil Island had all the same issues as Alcatraz and was kept open until 2011.
Anybody got anything to add? How might history have been effected by all of this?
In brief, what it says on the tin. Alcatraz was closed mainly due to the cost of running the place and the opposition of RFK when he was Attorney General. There are, however, ways that the cost could have been substantially mitigated. If a desalinization plant had been built on the island in the 1950s, maybe as part of the Eisenhower administration's infrastructure projects, it would have reduced costs by a lot. Moving the families of guards off the island also probably would have been helpful; the ferry to and from the island had to make like 20 runs a day just so people could go to and from work, school, errands, etc. and bringing in resources to support all those people added to the expense.
My idea for a POD is this: Frank Morris, the mover and shaker behind the infamous 1962 escape, started serving his sentence IOTL 1956 when he was arrested for bank robbery and given a fourteen year sentence. What if when he was first arrested (I'm sure he would have been held in a regular jail first) he was able to attempt an escape due to some perceived breach, but that effort failed, resulting in him being sent straight to Alcatraz upon conviction/guilty plea. IOTL he only ended up there in the early 1960s, so the whole timeline is moved forward and he executes a roughly similar escape attempt in premise to the 1962 one but is caught again while in the bay. This is all happens in 1957-58, but under the Eisenhower administration which had a much friendlier attitude to keeping the prison open. As a result of the escape, the DOJ makes an assessment of conditions at the prison and decides to renovate it to fix the concrete deterioration and add a desal plant while taking other money-saving measures to make it more cost effective. This investment and no 1962 escape keeps the place open through the RFK years and beyond. In the 1970s and 1980s when there is a gigantic increase in violent crime and politicians embrace tough on crime rhetoric, Alcatraz becomes an emblem of a tough correctional approach, and no one wants to close it for fear of being labeled weak on crime. Some changes are made during this period...greater paranoia about criminals and the need for more prison space leads to the families being moved off the island and the family quarters and communal buildings being bulldozed to build a Secure Housing Unit of the sort standard at all modern prisons. Politicians not wanting to touch the idea of tearing it down could keep it open well into the 2000s, maybe until close to the modern day. I think this all plausible; McNeil Island had all the same issues as Alcatraz and was kept open until 2011.
Anybody got anything to add? How might history have been effected by all of this?