During a House Appropriations Committee markup meeting before the Congressional recess, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) spoke about the reopening of Alcatraz as a detention facility for undocumented immigrants.
00:00The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Quigley, is recognized for the purpose of an amendment.
00:08I have an amendment at the desk. I ask that the reading be dispensed with.
00:13Without objection, the reading of the amendment is dispensed with,
00:16and the gentleman is recognized for remarks on his amendment.
00:19Mr. Chairman, Alcatraz Prison was officially closed in March of 1963.
00:25It was not closed, as some suspect, due to repeated escape attempts,
00:31where the sheer amount of money then that it took to keep the prison open
00:35made it impossible to justify its operation.
00:40In 1959, the cost to house one prisoner at Alcatraz
00:45was over three times higher than for a comparable prison in Atlanta.
00:51At its closing, there was an estimated $3 to $5 million in deferred maintenance costs.
00:59In 1981, 20 years later, President Reagan considered reopening Alcatraz,
01:07but ultimately decided against it as his administration realized
01:11it lacked any adequate facilities for housing inmates
01:15and was much more valuable as a national park.
01:19Alcatraz Island generates approximately $60 million annually
01:24as it receives over 1 million visitors from across the world.
01:29Hugh Hurwitz, who served as acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons,
01:34said he thought the idea of reopening Alcatraz was a joke.
01:39Yet, the president's border czar has said that Alcatraz
01:43could be an option for addressing our border crisis.
01:46My friends on the other side of the aisle included a provision of this bill
01:51which would prohibit the National Park Service from using any federal funds
01:56to provide housing for undocumented immigrants.
01:59And I agree.
02:00We should not waste taxpayer dollars on reopening Alcatraz
02:03for use as a detention center or a prison.
02:07My amendment would prevent the transfer of Alcatraz from the National Park Service
02:13and any funding to make it operational as a detention facility either.
02:18It is estimated right now that cost, put it in working order,
02:22is around $2 billion,
02:24and that it would cost around $500 a day
02:29to incorporate that cost to keep an inmate there.
02:33It would be cheaper to keep them at the Ritz,
02:37which is also a bad idea,
02:39and I encourage you to support this amendment.
02:42Thank the gentleman.
02:48The gentleman from Mido, Mr. Simpsons,
02:50recognize and respond to the amendment.
02:53Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
02:55I don't know that I disagree with anything
02:58that the gentleman from Illinois said.
03:01What I do know is this, though,
03:03is the previous administration created a crisis at our border.
03:08A crisis.
03:08This administration is trying to clean it up,
03:12and I don't want to take any option off the table.
03:16It costs $500 a day to hold them there.
03:18I don't know.
03:18That's cheaper than the motels or putting them in in New York.
03:22So why would you want to limit?
03:24I don't know if it's a good idea or not.
03:26I really don't.
03:27But I'm not willing to take any option off the table.
03:32It may be that you look at it and go,
03:34man, this is just crazy.
03:35It might be.
03:36I don't know.
03:36So I would oppose this amendment.
03:39Encourage my colleagues not to take options off the table
03:43of cleaning up the crisis that's been created
03:46by the previous administration.
03:47And I yield back the balance of my time.
03:50Thank you, gentlemen.
03:51The gentlelady from Maine is recognized to address the amendment.
03:56Thank you, Mr. Chair.
03:57I thank the gentleman from Illinois for his excellent amendment.
04:01And I do appreciate the chair's thought that maybe turning Alcatraz back
04:07into a prison is a dumb idea.
04:08So I appreciate your acknowledgement of that.
04:11But I do have to say that any time one of this administration's dumb ideas comes up,
04:18generally the defense of it from the other side is, oh, there's been a crisis at the border
04:23and we're just going to have to do this because you guys did that.
04:26So I'm not going to debate the crisis at the border.
04:29That's not the subcommittee we're on today.
04:31But I do want to clarify the president's plan is not to turn this into a border detention center.
04:38The president's plan is to turn this back into a prison, like a real prison that you go to when you break the law,
04:44you break into someone's house or you commit a murder.
04:46This is yet another prison.
04:48So on the face of it, I wish that we could just all say, this is just stupid.
04:54We're the Appropriations Committee.
04:57This would cost $2 billion.
04:59This prison was closed in 1963.
05:03At the time when this prison was still operating, it required, where did I see that?
05:10You know, something like a million gallons of water had to be transported out to this island just to maintain the prisoners.
05:18Yeah, a million gallons of water per week had to be shipped to the prison.
05:21So that's just one of the many costs of operating a prison like this.
05:25It's deeply impractical.
05:28It's now best used as a national park.
05:32I think it must be a lot of fun to go visit there and see what it looked like to see this prison on an island
05:39and to see the celebrated Alcatraz that no one could ever escape from, allegedly.
05:44And it belongs in the National Park Service.
05:47$2 billion.
05:48This is the administration that has talked us to death over fiscal responsibility about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse.
05:56How could you not say that was going to be waste, fraud, and abuse?
05:59And just to put it into context, $2 billion is exactly what the administration put into their allocation for the national parks.
06:08So they're willing to spend as much on converting this back to the prison as they do on all of our national parks.
06:17So if we're going to free up this kind of money, can we just put it into the national parks?
06:22I think they could greatly benefit from that, particularly after this bill that we're debating today cut the National Park Service by $213 million,
06:31that the Big Ully bill rescinded $267 million per park staffing,
06:38and that we haven't approved the Great American Art Doors Act so we don't have that long-term investment in capital needs in our parks.
06:45All of you either represent a national park, care about a national park, and know that every one of them has great needs.
06:52The staffing has already been cut, and there's not enough staffing this summer to meet the need of all the visitors who want to visit our parks.
07:00So could we just go back to saying this is a dumb idea, this is a misuse of $2 billion.
07:07We want to be the Appropriations Committee that talks about waste, fraud, and abuse that only applauds and allows for good ideas,
07:16and we want to support this amendment that removes the possibility of turning Alcatraz back into a prison.
07:23So I encourage you all to support Mr. Quigley's amendment, and I yield back.
07:28Thank you, gentlelady. Are there other members wishing to address the amendment?
07:32Seeing none, the gentleman is recognized for one minute to close.
07:38Mr. Chairman, I suspect that someone tested the word Alcatraz, and it came back as badass, right?
07:46And we want to get tough on crime. I get it.
07:51So we're going to call what we do in Florida Alcatraz or anything else that sounds tough Alcatraz.
07:58But that doesn't mean using the real Alcatraz when it didn't make sense when John F. Kennedy was president to do it again.
08:08There are other maximum security prisons.
08:11It would be cheaper to build a new one any place in the United States rather than to reopen Alcatraz.
08:19It's the extraordinary cost of its rehabilitation and the ongoing cost of having a prison on an island.
08:29So I respectfully ask for your support on this amendment.
08:35Thank you, gentlemen.
08:37The question is now on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Illinois.
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