Alcatraz’s last living prisoner on Trump’s plan to reopen prison

When Charlie Hopkins thinks back to the three years he spent in one of America’s most famous Prisons, he remembers the “deadly silent” the most.

In 1955 Hopkins was sent to Alcatraz – a prison on an isolated island off the coast of San Francisco – after he had caused problems with other prisons to perform a 17 -year prison for kidnapping and theft.

Falling asleep at night in his cell on the remote island, he said, the only sound was the whistle of ships that passed.

“That’s a lonely sound,” said Hopkins. “It reminds you that Hank Williams sings that song:” I am so single that I could cry. “

Now that 93 and lives in Florida, Hopkins said that the national archive of San Francisco told him that he is probably the last remaining former Alcatraz prisoner. The BBC could not verify this independently.

In an interview with the BBC this week, Hopkins described life in Alcatraz, where he made friends with gangsters and once helped to plan a failed escape. Although it was closed decades ago, President Donald Trump recently claimed that he wants to open it again as a federal prison.

When Hopkins was transferred to the prison with high security from a facility in Atlanta in 1955, he remembers that it was clean but bald. And there were few distractions – no radio at that time, and few books, he said.

“There was nothing to do,” he said. “You could walk back and forth in your cell or do push-ups.”

Hopkins remained busy for some time with his work that Alcatraz cleaned, sweeping the floors and buffering “until they sparkled,” he said.

He was sent to prison in Jacksonville, Florida in 1952 because of his role in a series of robberies and abductions. He was part of a group that took hostages to get through roadblocks and steal cars, he said.

Hopkins had a number of notorious neighbors at Alcatraz. The facility housed many violent criminals for 30 years – Al Capone; Robert Stroud, a murderer who is known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz”; And crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger – making it the subject of a large number of films and television shows.

An island of 22 hectares, 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) from San Francisco and surrounded by ice-cold waters with strong currents, Alcatraz was originally a Navy defense force. It was rebuilt in the beginning of the 20th century as a military prison. The Ministry of Justice took over in the 1930s and transformed the facility into a federal prison to tackle unbridled organized crime at the time.

Even in prison with high security, Hopkins said that he was still in trouble and spent many days in the “D -block” of the facility – lonely imprisonment whereby prisoners were held those crimes and rarely left their cells.

His longest stint there – six months – came after he tried to help several other prisoners, including the notorious Bankrover Forrest Tucker, Escape Alcatraz, Hopkins said. He helped Hacksaw Blades to steal from the prison electric store to cut the prison bars in the basement kitchen.

The plan did not work – prison protectors discovered the knives in the cells of other prisoners, Hopkins said. “A few days after they locked them up, they locked me up,” he said.

But that didn’t stop one of the prisoners.

In 1956, when Tucker was taken to a hospital for kidney surgery, he stuck his ankle with a pencil so that prison protectors should remove his leg irons, Tucker told The New Yorker. When he was taken to get an X -ray, he overwhelmed hospital orders and ran away, he said.

He was captured in a hospital coat in a cornfield hours later.

As more prisoners tried to escape from Alcatraz over the years, officials raised safety, said Hopkins.

“When I left there in 1958, the security was so tight that you couldn’t breathe,” he said.

All in all, there were 14 separate attempts over the years with 36 prisoners, according to the National Park Service. One of the most famous stakeholders Frank Morris, and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, who escaped in June 1962 by placing Paper-Maché heads in their beds and breaking out by ventilation channels. They were never found, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that they drowned in the cold water around the island.

A year later, the prison was closed after the government established that it would be more cost -effective to build new prisons than to keep the external island facility in use.

Now it is a public Run -Museum that visited millions every year is about $ 60 million years in income for park partners.

The building has fallen, with peeling of paint, rusted tubes and crumbling toilets in every tight cell. The construction of the main prison began in 1907, and more than a century of exposure to the elements made the place almost uninhabitable.

However, Trump said this week that he wants his government to be able to open the island prison again and expand for the “most ruthless and violent perpetrators of the country”.

Alcatraz “represents something very strong, very powerful” – law and order, Trump said.

But experts and historians said that Trump’s proposal to restore prison is far -fetched because it would cost billions to repair and bring them to other federal facilities.

Hopkins agrees. “It would be so expensive,” he said.

“At the time, the waste water went into the ocean,” he added. “They should think of another way to deal with that.”

Hopkins left Alcatraz five years before it closed its doors forever. He was transferred to a prison in Springfield, Missouri and received psychiatric medication that improved his behavior and helped him cure psychological problems, he said.

But the Avid Trump supporter said he does not believe that the president’s proposal is serious.

“He doesn’t really want to open that place,” said Hopkins, adding that Trump tried “to get a point about the audience” about punishing criminals and those who enter the US illegally.

Hopkins was released in 1963 and first worked at a truck stop before he adopted other jobs. He went back to his home state Florida, where he now has a daughter and grandson.

After a few decades thinking about his crimes and life in Alcatraz, he wrote a memoir of 1000 pages, with almost half of the book about his troubled behavior, he said.

“You would not believe the problems I had caused them when I was there,” he said. “I can see now, looking back, that I had problems.”