Latest news with #BureauOfPrisons
CBS News
4 days ago
- General
- CBS News
Colorado man sentenced after pleading guilty to threatening election officials
A Colorado man was sentenced to three years and one month in prison on Thursday after he pleaded guilty last fall to threatening election officials and other government employees. Teak Ty Brockbank of Cortez pleaded guilty Oct. 23, 2024 to sending an interstate threat. Prosecutors said Brockbank made several threats, some of them violent, toward election officials in Colorado and Arizona, a Colorado state judge, and federal law enforcement agents in 2021 and 2022. One image contained in a federal indictment against Teak Brockbank appears to show the Cortez, Colorado man shooting a rifle. Brockbank pleaded guilty to threatening election officials. U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado He could have faced up to five years in prison when the judge sentenced him to 37 months in the Bureau of Prisons and three years supervised release once he is released from prison. Brockbank was also ordered to pay $100 to the Crime Victim Fund.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US officials visit Alcatraz amid Trump's plan to reopen island prison
Federal prison officials visited Alcatraz last week after Donald Trump's announcement earlier this month of plans to rebuild and reopen the infamous island prison, which has been closed for over 60 years. David Smith, the superintendent of the Golden Gate national recreation area (GGNRA), told the San Francisco Chronicle that officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons are planning to return for further structural assessments. 'They have been out here. They'll be coming out again to do assessments of the structure,' Smith told the news outlet. The island facility has been closed since 1963, when then attorney general Robert F Kennedy ordered its shutdown amid high operating costs, limited space and multiple escape attempts. BOP director William Marshall told Fox News that engineering teams are already surveying the site. 'We've got engineering teams out there now that are doing some assessments, and so I'm just really excited about the opportunity and possibilities,' he said. In recent months, the US government has moved to reopen at least five previously closed detention centers and prisons. Although California lawmakers have dismissed the Alcatraz proposal as a 'distraction' and not a serious plan, the Trump administration is actively working – with the help of private prison companies – to reopen other facilities, some of which are already back in operation. Related: A hard cell? Alcatraz tourists dismiss Trump's 'insane' plan to revive it as a prison Smith said he was skeptical about reopening Alcatraz, pointing to the large financial investment and legal challenges it would require. He said it's 'just not well-situated' for the Bureau of Prisons. But Marshall called the proposal 'exciting' and feasible. He suggested that modern, lightweight materials could solve some of the island's logistical challenges. 'When you think of Alcatraz, you think of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Lambeau Field, those types of facilities … you just get that kind of feeling about Alcatraz when you think of those historical venues,' Marshall told Fox News's My View with Lara Trump, Trump's daughter-in-law. 'And so, yeah, we absolutely think we can get it done.' Meanwhile, the GGNRA is undertaking seismic retrofitting projects on the island, including reinforcing the pier and stabilizing the aging cellhouse to prevent further deterioration.
Reuters
20-05-2025
- Health
- Reuters
Watchdog faults Bureau of Prisons for failing to screen inmates for colorectal cancer
WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is failing to routinely screen older inmates for colorectal cancer, and has in some cases failed to follow up with proper medical care after inmates tested positive in cancer screening, a new report has found. The report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz comes after one of the government's most high-profile inmates, former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, died of colon cancer in June 2023. Hanssen was serving a life sentence after he pleaded guilty to spying for the Soviet Union and later for Russia. According to Horowitz's report, Hanssen had multiple positive results on a stool test commonly used to screen for colorectal cancer, but was never given a diagnosis or offered a follow-up colonoscopy. Tuesday's report from Horowitz also cited concerns about a second inmate - Frederick Bardell - who also died of colon cancer in June 2023 shortly after leaving prison on compassionate release. A judge previously scolded the BOP for repeatedly rejecting his requests for release due to his cancer diagnosis, and Horowitz's report found that Bardell faced a 6-month delay in getting a colonoscopy after he first noticed blood in his stool. "Our evaluation identified several serious operational and managerial deficiencies that the BOP must address to ensure that inmates receive proper screening and treatment for colorectal cancer," Horowitz wrote. Based on his review, he said his office found that less than two-thirds of average risk inmates between ages 45 and 74 received a colorectal cancer screening as of April 2024. The review also found that about 10% of a sampling of 327 inmates had no documented medical follow-up after receiving a positive result in colorectal cancer screening. In a written response to Horowitz's report, BOP Director William Marshall said he concurred with the report's recommendations for improving cancer screenings for inmates, and blamed "longstanding staffing issues" for compromising efforts to screen inmates for colorectal cancer in certain facilities. "If detected early, colorectal cancer has a 5-year survival rate of 90%, with survival declining steeply the later it is caught," he wrote. "The Bureau is fully committed to its ongoing efforts to improve in these areas."
Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Alcatraz's last living inmate and MAGA fan gives shock take on Trump's plan to re-open notorious prison
A former inmate of Alcatraz who once swept the floors of America's most infamous prison is brushing aside Donald Trump 's bombshell plan to bring the facility back to life. Charlie Hopkins, 93, is the last known living man to have worn the steel-gray uniform of Alcatraz, but even as a fervent Trump supporter he believes the president's plan to reopen The Rock is just a bluff. 'He don't really want to open that place,' Hopkins said speaking to the BBC from his home in Florida. 'He's just trying to get a point across to the public.' When Trump declared he had 'directed the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt Alcatraz ', his words ignited a flurry online - particularly among critics. The prison was shut down in 1963 and has been crumbling into San Francisco Bay ever since. But Trump wrote last Sunday that he envisioned the notorious lockup would once again house 'America's most ruthless and violent offenders.' Hopkins, who served time on the island from 1955 to 1958 for kidnapping and robbery, says he supports Trump but laughs off the idea of reviving a prison he calls 'deader than the convicts it held.' 'It would be so expensive,' he said. 'Back then, the sewage system went into the ocean. They'd have to come up with another way of handling that. 'You can't go back in time,' Hopkins added. 'That place belongs to the past.' The plan was rolled out by Trump earlier this month standing behind a podium draped in American flags. He declared how ' Alcatraz represents something very strong, very powerful - law and order.' But experts, historians, and even some members of Trump's inner circle have admitted that the proposal is less about incarceration and more about imagination. 'I have two words: water and sewage,' said Jolene Babyak, an author and Alcatraz historian who lived on the island as a child while her father served as prison administrator. Others are even more blunt. 'To be frank, at first I thought it was a joke,' said Hugh Hurwitz, former acting director of the Bureau of Prisons. 'You'd have to tear it up and start over.' The island's buildings are literally falling apart with no fencing, updated plumbing, or any real way to house prisoners in compliance with modern federal standards. 'You can't run a prison in a historic ruin,' Hurwitz said. In a post shared to TruthSocial on Sunday night, Trump vowed 'the reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE' But for Trump, who has already begun to send gang members and has even proposed sending American criminals to foreign prisons like the one in El Salvador, symbolism is what matters most. 'It sort of represents something that is both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable,' he told reporters. Democrats do not appear to be amused. Nancy Pelosi, whose district includes Alcatraz, dismissed the idea as unserious. State Senator Scott Wiener called it 'deeply unhinged' and 'an attack on the rule of law.' For Charlie Hopkins, the controversy has stirred memories buried deep in the bedrock of Alcatraz Island. He remembers the sound of ship whistles echoing across the bay - 'a lonely sound,' he said, that reminded him of the Hank Williams song 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.' Hopkins landed on Alcatraz in 1955 after causing trouble at other prisons. He had been part of a violent gang that used hostages to blow through police roadblocks and steal cars across Florida. On the Rock, he scrubbed floors 'until they shined,' did push-ups in his tiny cell, and spent six months in D Block - solitary confinement - after helping smuggle hacksaw blades for a failed prison break. 'There was nothing to do. You could walk back and forth in your cell or do push-ups,' Hopkins recalled. The ringleader of that escape, bank robber Forrest Tucker, would later stab himself with a pencil during a hospital visit to slip out of his restraints. He was caught hours later in a cornfield wearing a hospital gown. 'When I left there in 1958, the security was so tight you couldn't breathe,' Hopkins recalled. He left Alcatraz five years before it closed and was transferred to a prison in Missouri, where he received psychiatric treatment. After his release in 1963, he returned to Florida and led a quieter life, eventually writing a 1,000-page memoir. 'You wouldn't believe the trouble I caused them when I was there,' he said. 'I can see now, looking back, that I had problems.' More than 1.4 million people visit Alcatraz each year, walking its cellblocks, peering into rusted toilets, and snapping selfies beside the legendary steel bars. The island museum generates roughly $60 million annually for the National Park Service. But for Trump, the prison is a symbol worth resurrecting even despite turning it back into a prison would require billions. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Alcatraz was nearly three times as expensive to operate as other facilities when it shut down - and that was before a half-century of saltwater decay set in. 'You'd need water, electricity, heat, sanitation,' said historian John Martini, who worked for years as a ranger on the island. 'It's basically a shell.'
New York Times
11-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why We Can't Escape Alcatraz
When President Trump recently said he wanted to reopen Alcatraz, to 'lock up the most dangerous criminals and keep them far away from anyone they could harm,' it was hard to know how seriously to take him. The federal government already houses its worst offenders at a supermax prison near Florence, Colo. — the 'Alcatraz of the Rockies' — where Zacarias Moussaoui, El Chapo, Eric Rudolph and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are held in conditions far more brutal, isolating and inescapable than anything Alcatraz ever had to offer. One day later, the president doubled down, calling Alcatraz 'the ultimate' in terms of being 'very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order,' and referring to the movies about the place and the failed escapes: 'It sort of represents something that's both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak, it's got a lot of qualities that are interesting.' What he was trying to conjure, in his associative but effective way, is Alcatraz's continuing hold on the American imagination, its force as a metaphor for a no-holds-barred, publicly retributive form of justice. Alcatraz was and remains as much an idea as a place. James V. Bennett, the director of the Bureau of Prisons for nearly the entirety of Alcatraz's operation as a federal penitentiary, grasped the enduring symbolic power of the island from the start: 'Always when I went to Alcatraz after that first [visit] in 1937,' he wrote years later, 'it seemed to me that this was the place where the legend of the big house in the annals of crime would live the longest and die the hardest. Alcatraz was never without a sense of fantasy.' 'Fantasy' is a strange word to use in relation to a supermax prison, at the time supposedly the toughest ever built, but we understand it intuitively because many of us have participated in it. Anybody who has watched 'Escape from Alcatraz,' or played the video games, or donned the headphones and shuffled through the cell house audio tour, has played a role in the collective maintenance and propagation of the fantasy that is Alcatraz: the most notorious criminals, the harshest conditions, the solid steel doors to the solitary cells, the dummy heads in the beds of those, immortalized in the movie, who escaped in 1962. Mr. Trump's plans remain unlikely. Beyond the prohibitive cost and decrepit infrastructure, the logistical complications alone are fatal. The island has no source of fresh water, and everything required to sustain life there, from food and water to fuel, has to be brought in by barge or boat. Those practical considerations aren't what the president is talking about, when he floats the idea of bringing a 113-year-old prison back online to house the proverbial 'worst of the worst.' What he's talking about is the fantasy. The now-iconic cell house, which sits atop steep island cliffs in the middle of San Francisco Bay, didn't start out as a symbol of anything. The main building was built in the early 1900s to house an influx of military prisoners in the wake of the Spanish-American War; it was only after the Justice Department took it over in 1933 that people started talking about how 'escape- proof' it could be. (The early military prisoners had no trouble breaking out of the building; two men escaped within months of its opening in 1912, never to be seen again, and others would follow.) Amid a Prohibition-era surge in crime, the Department of Justice decided it needed a location to house the gangsters, bootleggers, kidnappers and escape artists that state and lower-rate federal penitentiaries couldn't hold. Alcatraz wasn't the ideal choice, as its limitations were clear, but money was tight in 1933. The building already existed, it could be retrofitted to enhance its security at a relatively low cost, and the notion of the forbidding 'island prison' had a long and easily-summoned history in the public imagination. When the federal penitentiary opened in 1934, with the arrival of Al Capone in August from Atlanta and Machine Gun Kelly in September from Leavenworth, the notoriety of the prisoners and the stated mission of the place brought an intense level of scrutiny from the general public. The Bureau of Prisons' direct instructions to Warden James Johnston, in the face of this interest, were to cultivate an 'air of mystery' about the prison's operations and rarely respond to press or other inquiries. With a few exceptions, Warden Johnston followed this policy for the first 12 years of the prison's operation. When inmate Henry Young was brought to trial in San Francisco in 1941 for the premeditated murder of a fellow inmate, the jury and newspaper-reading public were prepared to believe the undeniably perjurious testimony of the inmates who spoke in Young's defense. Inmate after inmate took the stand and told terrifying stories of torture and deprivation at the hands of brutal prison guards, over the repeated objections of the government's lawyers. This led to Young's conviction on a lesser charge, on the grounds that Alcatraz was the true culprit; the foreman of the jury went so far as to call for a federal investigation into the prison's operation after rendering the verdict. Much that was said on the witness stand was not true, but the nation had been exposed to the possibility that it might be. The bureau's policy of never setting the record straight allowed wilder and wilder tales to proliferate as time went on: the Island had driven Capone mad! (He was suffering from late-stage syphilis). The legend and mystique, which the bureau had originally tried to cultivate for its deterrent effects, had jumped the tracks and become unmanageable. By the time the administration tried to correct public perception, it was already too late. A crucial element in the prison's mythology was its unavoidable presence in the middle of the Bay. There it sat for all to see, its powerhouse pumping out thick black smoke as lines of men walked to and from their jobs in the factories twice each weekday. People paid to view the island through telescopes from Fisherman's Wharf, hoping to catch a glimpse of somebody famous. When the escape siren sounded, which it did rarely but just enough, the entire bay became an amphitheater. During a brutal attempted break in 1946, when several convicts managed to get their hands on two guns and cause 48 hours of mayhem inside the cell house, the gunfire and grenade explosions around the prison could be seen and heard from the mainland. Traffic slowed on the Golden Gate Bridge and cars parked three deep from Russian Hill to Coit Tower as the siege played out. Spectators sat out in the parks and on sidewalks to watch the action, a death match in real time, like the picnickers at Bull Run during the Civil War. That proximity to the city, and the city's proximity to the prison, cemented the public's connection with what went on there. No matter how mythically brutal a prison might be, it won't hold our attention if it's in Florence, Colo., because we can't see it, can't see ourselves in it and it can't see us. Many who take the audio tour on Alcatraz are struck by the same moment: the prisoner who describes being able to hear the dance band, the clinking of glasses and the women laughing at a yacht club across the bay on New Year's Eve. For a second we feel like maybe we can understand what torture it must have been to lie there and listen. A boundary in time and space briefly becomes permeable, and then we get to go back to being ourselves again. Alcatraz was full of such paradoxes, the escape-proof prison that wasn't actually escape-proof. (The three escapees who made it out of the prison and into the water sometime on the evening of June 11, 1962, are presumed to have drowned, but nobody has proved that they did and they had several hours' head start.) Alcatraz was also a much more humane place than its legend suggests. Yes, it was the end of the line, and as such it was a place of strict routine, restricted privileges and sometimes harsh treatment, but prisoners would tell you that it was the mundane monotony of the place, not the tough conditions, that made doing time there challenging. Even the men in isolation in D Block remained in touch with the rest of the block, where other prisoners could hear their voices, monitor their treatment and even sneak them contraband sandwiches and cigarettes. No such luck for the men locked up in Florence today, who are in lockdown 23 hours a day, have almost no ability to see or connect with another human being and would probably give their arms to serve at Alcatraz as it was. The administration on the island and at the Bureau of Prisons cared about the men more than you might expect. They met with them, listened to their complaints, encouraged them and wrote their families thoughtful and even misleadingly positive letters to keep minds at ease. Many inmates became so accustomed to the routine on Alcatraz that when they were transferred to other prisons — a reward for good behavior — they asked to go back. As Harry Radkay, who was housed next to Machine Gun Kelly, put it, 'If you minded your own business and did your own time, no one bothered you.' This is not the Alcatraz that they show you on the tour, nor is it the Alcatraz that the current administration has in mind when it contemplates reopening the place. When Mr. Trump mentions Alcatraz in the same sentence as Sing Sing, a similarly ancient prison in New York, and then refers to 'the movies,' the jig is mostly up. He likes Alcatraz, the Big House of big houses, because it has the right look, the right image, the right clientele and it's right in everyone's faces — his sweet spot. Underneath that, though, one senses a powerful nostalgia for something that never actually existed: a simpler time, a black-and-white movie, a fertile seedbed for the Manichean atavism that has always powered his messaging. Whether he can create what would inevitably become a casino of human misery on the island isn't really the point. He plants the seed, knowing that our fascination with Alcatraz, developed over the years by the same myth- and moviemaking that influenced him, will supply the rest.
