The news that Trump ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reopen Alcatrazreminded me that years ago, after visiting the island soon after it became a national park in the company of two Weather Underground fugitives, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, I wrote a story about our adventure. I was worried about their safety and changed their names. They weren’t worried. Published in Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine, City, the piece was originally titled “Alcatraz Island.” Before sending it to the editor, Ken Kelley, who I knew from underground newspaper days, I gave it to Abbie Hoffman who was also a fugitive and invited him to read it. Abbie changed the title. “An Island called Alcatraz” sounds better than “Alcatraz Island.” He was right. When it came to language as well as the titles of books and articles he was spot on. Revolution for the Hell of It, Woodstock Nation and Steal This Book were some of the titles for his books. Kelley, who interviewed Abbie for Playboy, died in prison in 2008.

In 1975, Abbie was living in San Francisco at the home of Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane and later the Starship. At the same time, Dohrn and Ayres rented an apartment on Fillmore Street in the city. As I recall, their paths didn’t cross. I don’t know how those seventies’ fugitives would respond to Trump’s idea to bring back Alcatraz as a prison, though they had spent time in jails and prisons, denounced the incarceration of political prisoners, and demanded an end to the prison industrial complex.

Not long ago, it seemed possible that Trump might be a felon in prison and at the same time the legally elected president of the US. All attempts to convict him of the crimes he committed have so far failed. We now have a criminal in the White House who has called for the arrest, deportation and incarceration of men who may have had nothing more guilty than their tattoos.

There’s a long list of presidents and prime ministers, including Robert Mugabe and Mohamed Morsi, who have been overthrown and imprisoned. Trump would not be the first head of state to find himself behind bars serving a sentence. He clearly has prisons on his mind. Hence the notion of making Alcatraz a prison again doesn’t seem out of character  “Lock her up,” he once said of Hillary Clinton. Trump has also pardoned a great many individuals convicted of crimes and who were serving prison terms. That’s fairness according to Trump. It would be poetic justice if he were to be incarcerated at a restored Alcatraz.

In recent years I have also visited the island in the company of Native Americans who occupied the island for 19 months in 1969, 1970 and 1971. John Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s right hand man for domestic affairs, directed federal marshals to remove the Indians from the island, which had become, in the words of Indian writer, Vine Deloria—the author of Custer Died for Your Sins — as “a spiritual space.” The island was also a sanctuary for birds. It still is. Back in the 1970s, Deloria observed that the funniest line, uttered by an unidentified White House spokesperson during the 19-month occupation was “Get those Indians out of that prison or we’ll throw them in jail.” Someone not in Washington D.C. ‘s corridors of power today might say approps Trump, “Get that criminal out of his bunker or we’ll throw him in jail.”

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