Alligator Alcatraz
Last week, Florida’s Attorney General announced his state was moving forward with plans to build a new migrant detention center, affectionately nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”. This stinging sobriquet arrives not by way of angry liberals decrying the deranged decisions of the increasingly fascistic Republican Party’s favorite peninsular test location, but rather from the Florida AG himself.
It’s an altogether complex identity peppered with the endemic subtlety for which Republicans have been known during the bifurcated Trump era. The “Alcatraz” part is a sly reference to America’s most well-known (now-closed) prison, and the “alligator” bit references the lacertillian lurkers for which Florida, and particularly the Florida everglades, is world-renowned.
The plan is rooted, more than anything, in fiscal conservatism: what in our justice system drains more money from government coffers than the personnel costs required to keep criminals and wrong-place-wrong-time brown folks behind the bars they’re so irritatingly dedicated to climbing over? Paying corrections officers to man the perimeter and ensure the structural integrity of the barriers keeping our nation’s most dangerous offenders and most bilingual laborers away from our children and wage thieves is making us poor.
Government is best that costs least. Why pay trained COs to maintain prison order when the Everglades are full of airboatloads of alligators who will eat and digest Visa overstayers for free?
It’s a perfect plan, no notes. But if I did have notes, I’d put forth that we’re not going far enough with this new security scheme. Sure, this is the closest to fruition President Trump’s 2019 plan to dig a thousand-mile trench along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and fill it with snakes and alligators has come, but why stop there? Alligators are a natural deterrent to escape attempts, but alligators only eat when they’re hungry. If we want to ensure that absconding would-be gangland terrorists and/or roof replacers are absolutely destroyed ten times out of ten, we would be wise to include something that consumes its victims regardless of hunger: fire.
Haters and losers will argue that setting the Everglades, a famously wet region of a famously wet peninsula, is implausible. But my advanced education allows me to explain to you that implausible is not synonymous with impossible. A place’s dampness doesn’t entirely preclude it from supporting fire. If it did, the Cuyahoga River would be totally unremarkable and Cleveland would have no culture. Much like Trump’s plan to export the Everglades to the full length of the often-desert southern border, all we have to do is extrapolate Cleveland to the Everglades.
Of course, I’m no idiot, and even I must acknowledge that this transition from page to life of the Princess Bride’s Fire Swamp will be hindered somewhat by Florida’s annoying status as a hurricane magnet. Each time anything north of a tropical storm blasts its way over America’s most embarrassingly phallic state, it’ll be left up to a paid government employee to go and relight the swamp.
Unless, of course, we can outsource another job to the animal kingdom. Alligators, being lizards, are one, maybe two steps removed from—are you ahead of me? — dragons. Like I said, I’m no buffoon. I know dragons aren’t real. And making them real would involve funding the very same scientific researchers I can’t stand. That’s time, money, education all down the metaphorical drain. I propose a cheaper option: we duct tape flamethrowers to the alligators.
Sure, we’ll have to eat the costs of a dozen or so incendiary war weapons, but how does that compare to the salary and benefits of a full one, maybe two people? And to preemptively answer the vegan, animal rights freaks out there: this will help the alligators. Up until now, all of their meals have been raw. Florida’s newest pitmasters will have us to thank the first time they try charbroiled cottonmouth.
Obviously this isn’t my final proposal. I’ll have to dot the “i”s, cross the “t”s, and fully research whether or not we have the technology to do that thing the dementors in Harry Potter do where they make you sad just by lingering. Havana Syndrome, maybe?
Either way, let’s not let perfect be the enemy of good. This plan’s got solid bones. Alligator Alcatraz is a great idea in my book, because nothing says “we don’t want you in our country” like “we will feed you to alligators if you try to leave”.