The president’s call to reopen the federal prison on Alcatraz Island is right in line with his sadistic notion of justice, no matter the cost or the physical obstacles to turning The Rock — now a national park and a multimillion-dollar tourist attraction — back into the cruelest and most unusual punishment site in the country, intended to compete with the Salvadoran dungeon where he’s been sending people with tattoos.

Alcatraz is not only the slammer where the baddest American criminals served the hardest time, from its opening in 1934 to 1963 when it was shut because it cost too much to run, but it is just a short, unsurvivable swim from San Francisco, one of the nation’s bluest and queerest cities. Restoring Alcatraz as an escape-proof prison would be another way of trolling liberal and LGBTQ+ Democrats — who someday soon could be candidates for confinement. Never mind that the island has no infrastructure, no water, no sewage system, or that the buildings’ concrete walls have been rotted by decades of salty fog, or that except for the cell block spruced up for the 1979 Clint Eastwood movie “Escape from Alcatraz” (and maintained since for paying visitors), nothing’s left but a crumbling ruin — those primitive conditions are the point: to make people suffer.

As the ranger described incarceration there on the tour I took more than 40 years ago, “the exquisite torture of routine” was the essence of Alcatraz, cut off as it was from all outside communication — no phone calls, no visitors, no radios, no newspapers, no magazines. Isolated from the outside world and from one another, inmates had nothing but time to contemplate their fate and try to keep from going mad with boredom. The jailer in chief has no doubt conceived the made-for-TV idea of “Alcatraz” as a reality show from hell: its hardcore cruelty is part of its dramatic appeal.

The synchronism with Eastwood’s film is purely coincidental, but my interest in Alcatraz also dates from the late 1970s when I founded a journal and chose that name, in part for its resonance with the San Francisco literary tradition. I also liked the kabbalistic buzz of triple A’s and a Z, and the fact that the island was named by the Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775 for the pelicans covering it. Those ungainly yet graceful birds, now on the rebound from near extinction, continue to cruise these shores with elegance. And in Mexican Spanish alcatraz also means calla lily, as portrayed in Diego Rivera’s early oil paintings.

Now that Trump has claimed Alcatraz as part of the new American gulag, I think of it as a place where I might be sent when he gets around to jailing journalists as enemies of the people. (As a joke in the profession goes, “First they came for the journalists; we don’t know what happened after that.”) I wish I were joking, but unless the Supreme Court and Congress derail his plans, the way things are going it’s only a matter of time before lawsuits and financial penalties to curb unfriendly media coverage are escalated to Putinoid methods of neutralizing political opponents: poisoning, murder by unidentified assassins, arrest and imprisonment. The Sentinel may be a tiny platform relative to national print and broadcast outlets, but AI can locate anything online that takes the president’s name in vain.

So, if some Saturday morning you find me inexplicably absent from this page — or the whole newspaper gone — I may have been waylaid by masked marauders, tossed into an unmarked van and disappeared for publishing criminal opinions. I figure I’ve had a good run for nearly eight decades and have already outlived a lot of my friends, so if I end up stranded and starved on Alcatraz, or stashed in El Salvador or Guantánamo, or lost in Libya or Rwanda or Siberia, at least I will have gone down swinging. Such a fate would be no worse than to slink away in fear with a bad conscience.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays. Back issues of the international literary journal Alcatraz can be found via stephenkessler.com.