If Donald Trump gets convicted, can we just lock him up inside Mar-a-Lago's tower?

As criminal charges mount against Donald Trump, pundits have begun saying that, in the event he is convicted of a serious felony, there’s no way to lock up a former president with Secret Service protection.

I think they’re missing something.

Sure, it would be hard imagining Trump doing time, Shawshank-Redemption-like, in a traditional crossbar hotel with three guys in dark suits, sunglasses and ear pieces standing outside his cell and staring at his fellow cellies.

But there’s another option.

I’m talking about the tower at Mar-a-Lago. It’s the signature architectural flourish of that Palm Beach mansion.

It’s both iconic and available.

The 75-foot tower rises from the roof of the Mediterranean-styled mansion. It’s got a mission-tile roof with a decorative stucco chimney and four cantilevered balconies that look out in all directions.

There’s a bedroom and bathroom up there, too. (Did anybody check the top of the toilet tank for nuclear secrets?)

It’s even got a colored light on top that’s visible miles away in West Palm Beach, a light that can be used as a public service to indicate when Trump is posting incendiary misinformation on Truth Social.

The tower would be both convenient for Trump and also a visible reminder to the rest of us that you can end up above Mar-a-Lago, but you can’t end up above the law.

With some slight architectural refitting — I’m guessing there must be a tasteful way to add barbed wire — the tower could be the answer to all those questions about how to imprison a former president.

After all, towers are natural prisons. The Mar-a-Lago tower prison would be following in the footsteps of the Tower of London as well as that tower in the Grimms’ Fairy Tale that housed Rapunzel.

“Donald Trump, Donald Trump, let down your hair!” his supporters can shout from their gathering spot on the nearby Southern Boulevard causeway.

You know that if Trump were locked away completely out of sight in some supermax federal prison, there’d be all sorts of misinformation spread about the “prison hoax” and how he’s really not locked up at all but instead living as a free man on some golf-blessed tropical island.

The beauty of him being locked up in the Mar-a-Lago tower is that he’d be visible to passersby. I’m not saying there still wouldn’t be “prison deniers” among the MAGA crowd but it would probably just be 30 percent of Republican voters, instead of 35 percent.

As far as logistics, the Secret Service detail could be posted downstairs at the tower entrance, where they would prevent low-speed golf cart escapes while facilitating tower deliveries of charred hamburgers, fresh My Pillows, and the latest plans to submit a false slate of jurors for his remaining trials.

More: Cerabino: Dear Mar-a-Lago Club members, this FBI raid is going to cost you

Of course, the partial prison conversion of the Mar-a-Lago Club will have to get zoning approval from the Town of Palm Beach.

Town regulators will probably insist on a low-wattage, turtle-friendly search lights, Yorkies instead of German shepherds patrolling the perimeter, and a sports-coat requirement over prison jumpsuits during meal time.

And the property would need to be renamed The Mar-a-Lago Correctional Center and Club. This might cause a dip in membership at first.

Club members might be freaked out eating dinner on the lanai while a sullen Trump paces in his tower prison, while posting on Truth Social: “IF YOU COME AFTER ME, SEAGULLS, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”

But it could be quite a novelty for club members to sit there dining as golf balls from the tower driving range sail over their heads toward the Intracoastal.

“Aw, he’s hitting golf balls today,” they’d say between bites. “Four more years!”

I suspect that over time, the tower prison may make the club more popular. This will be especially true if judges grant Trump’s motions for humane exercise periods to include being taken downstairs to the ballroom to dance to the YMCA song at the weddings receptions being held there.

Warehousing inmate Trump at Mar-a-Lago would also allow him to closely supervise the running of his club, a major funding source of his future legal bills, while also making himself visible to his followers if Fox News personalities stop taking his calls.

He could routinely appear at one of the tower balconies, waving and giving the thumbs up to the procession of giant-flag waving pickup trucks parading on Ocean Boulevard in front of the prison.

Being confined in the tower will be important to his mental health. He’ll not only hear the cheers of his loyal fans but he’ll be able to spend his days, weeks, months and years scanning the horizon, waiting in vain for the imagined arrival of the U.S. Supreme Court justices he appointed to free him.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, a part of the USA TODAY Florida Network.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Mar-a-Lago tower in Palm Beach would be fitting prison for Donald Trump