#prisons

I very much enjoy the chain gang role play and we put a lot of effort into creating authentic experiences.

The color images in this post represent our Adopt A Highway campaign at FCJ which is pure public exposure work. The state will not allow us to use leg irons for safety reasons but the experience is 100% authentic.

The downside of this is that 4 guys signed up last week. One was a no show. That is 25% of the work force not there.

And when I post chain gang related content, the "likes" plummet! Finally even questions drop off.

I made this comment a year ago in response to a post in a subreddit discussing a report in which President Trump floated the idea of "re-opening" Alcatraz as a temporary holding facility for deportations - the post specifically asked whether respondents were for or against the idea, and why.

Neither. I think the idea needs much more justification/explanation (the President obviously likes to spit-ball ideas and runs with what sticks, which is not only an unorthodox approach to policy but also has its own pros and cons). Based on what little I know so far:

I'll start with the pros:

One more holding facility could be useful (less time-consuming) instead of having to build a new one from scratch.

Complete escape from the facility was notoriously difficult while it was in operation, and that would still be true if reactivated simply due to its location on a small island.

That about does it for the pros. Now onto the cons:

Cost - it would be inordinately expensive to bring the prison, which has been decommissioned since 1963 and has been a tourist attraction since about that time, to activation and modern standards (which would also mostly eliminate any historical value it has). Importantly, if reconverted into an active modern prison, the Golden Gate National Recreational Area will lose the ~U$60 million it gets annually from tourist visits to Alcatraz, so rather than generating revenue it would now be an expense.

Capacity - it was built to have a capacity for 312 inmates. In the grand scheme of things (e.g. tens or even hundreds of thousands of deportations, or even a few hundred deportations of violent criminals) this is too small, and I think it fails to justify the cost of reactivating and running the place as a prison.

Access to transport - if the purpose of a reactivated Alcatraz is to temporarily house/hold people slated for deportation (expedited or otherwise), the lack of easy access to an isolated air terminal or ship dock makes it highly inefficient as a holding facility (it was intended and used as a terminal/maximum security prison, not a holding facility), as all prisoners would have to be boated to the island, then boated back to the mainland, and then transported to whatever conveyance is going to be used to deport them.

Island size - while the President has suggested that a reactivated Alcatraz would be expanded (thereby addressing the capacity issue), given the fact that its campus already occupies much of the island, the main method of expanding the prison's capacity would be by building up, which would require both an architectural survey of the current structures as well as a geological survey of the island itself to determine whether or not the current structures and the island can support this. It would be either that or effectively re-building the prison campus from scratch to increase capacity, both of which fail to address either the cost or transport access criticisms.

Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark:

AT EVERY TURN SINCE DONALD TRUMP regained office, Delaney Hall, the detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has been central in the struggle against the administration’s cruel approach to immigration enforcement. Democratic lawmakers have been arrested and physically harassed at the site. Detainees there have launched a hunger strike to draw attention to what they describe as its deplorable conditions. And as the protests have grown more regular, so too have the violent efforts by federal agents to quash them. The facility, situated in an industrial strip a stone’s throw from Newark Bay, is a composite of all that emerges from Trump’s punishing mass-deportation system. But why Delaney Hall? What is it about that place that has made it the center of these clashes in Trump 2.0? Part of it is that New Jersey lawmakers have proven keen to directly confront the administration.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) is one of them. He showed up at Delaney in late May to monitor a hunger and labor strike launched in response to “disease, overflowing toilets, poor ventilation, and worm-riddled food.” While on site on Memorial Day, he attempted to de-escalate a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents and got pepper-sprayed for his troubles. Kim, who has since said that that week was one of the most difficult of his life, says violence felt almost inevitable that day. He said he hasn’t seen New Jersey so close to the edge at any point in his time in office. The problems, he added in an interview with me, start with the facility itself.

Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group. The private prison giant was last year awarded a $1 billion contract lasting fifteen years that quadrupled detention center space in New Jersey. The Delaney Hall compound is so shoddily constructed that four detainees broke out last June. “First, the facility needs to be shut down. It’s not up to any type of standard,” Kim told me. “When there was this breakout of four detainees last year, I actually went to figure out what happened. GEO Group refused to let me in at first. Someone that worked there told me the exterior wall of that cell was just made of mesh and drywall.” “It’s an exceedingly old building, not up to standards, which is causing so many of the problems and poor conditions—like the extreme heat detainees are complaining about now,” Kim said of the facility. Built a quarter-century ago, Delaney was used for much of the last decade as a halfway house; it reopened last year as a GEO-run immigrant-detention facility.

The facility’s location is another reason it has become so central to the story of Trump’s immigration horrors. New Jersey is a “warehouse” state, as Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, which is part of the ICE Out of New Jersey coalition, noted. Which means there are ample targets for an administration looking to ramp up workplace enforcement. On top of that, Delaney Hall is close to both a major airport and the second-largest port in the country—each critical pinchpoints for ICE operations. Morsy, whose group has protested Delaney Hall and advocated for immigrant rights, described it as the ideal place for the administration “to pilot and launch the deportation matrix.” “What we’re seeing is a symptom of the infrastructure the fascist regime has laid out in New Jersey,” she added. In fact, the first workplace raid of Trump’s second administration occurred in Newark. The Ocean Seafood Depot was raided in January 2025, within seventy-two hours of Trump returning to office. At the time, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka described the “indignity” experienced by a Puerto Rican veteran whose military credentials were questioned after he was swept up in the raid. Four months later, Baraka, who has long sought to close Delaney Hall, was himself arrested outside it.

In Trump world, though, we cannot overlook the political component when explaining why Delaney has become Ground Zero for Trump’s deportation efforts. Flush with confidence from Trump’s victory in 2024 and his overperformance in the traditionally blue state, MAGA allies began viewing New Jersey as a swing state. Trump installed his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, as an acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. And she quickly looked to make a splash. Confrontations with Democratic lawmakers were a simple way to impress MAGA zealots and further press Republicans’ “advantage” on immigration. Delaney Hall was the staging ground. It didn’t hurt matters that the site sits not too far away from New York City. The Trump administration got the major media market publicity it craved without the risk of a swell of protesters fighting back.

...inadequate medical care, and inhumane living conditions. The latest Council of Europe report on overall prison conditions, published on Tuesday, points to a persistent problem of overcrowding, with several countries in a critical situation and others close to maximum capacity. Based on data supplied by the prison services of the 46 member states of the Strasbourg-based organisation, the document confirms the trend towards rising prison populations, already highlighted in the latest Eurostat survey (+2%), also made public only a few days ago. Between 31 January 2024 and 31 January 2025, the number of prisoners per 100 available places rose from 94.7 to 95.2, despite regional discrepancies. In the previous assessment, six countries reported severe overcrowding; there are now nine. Turkey and France are among the states with the most congested prisons, with 131 prisoners for every 100 places. They are followed by Croatia (123), Italy (121), Malta (118), Cyprus (117), Hungary (115), Belgium (114) and Ireland (112). Five more countries are above capacity and face what is described as moderate overcrowding: Finland (110), Greece (108), the United Kingdom in its Scottish part (106), North Macedonia (104) and Sweden (103). As for Portugal’s prison system, it is operating very close to capacity (99), in a better position than Romania (100), but with a higher occupancy rate than Azerbaijan (98), England and Wales in the United Kingdom (96), Serbia (96), Czechia (95), the Netherlands (95), Denmark (95) and Switzerland (95). The Council of Europe points out that an occupancy rate of 90% already corresponds to a high‑risk indicator and significant operational pressure.