Madeline Halpert and Lily Jamali
BBC News, New York
Whenever Charlie Hopkins thinks about the three years he spent in one of America's most notorious prisons, the "dead silence" he remembers most is the silence.
Hopkins was sent to Alcatraz in 1955, a notorious prison on an isolated island off the coast of San Francisco, after causing trouble in other prisons where he was serving a 17-year sentence for kidnapping and robbery.
As he drifted off to sleep at night in his cell on a remote island, he said, the only sound he could hear was the sirens of passing ships.
"It's the sound itself."
"It reminds you of that Hank Williams song, 'I'm so lonely I feel like crying,'" Hopkins says.
He is now 93 years old and lives in Florida, and the National Archives in San Francisco has informed him that he is likely the last surviving former prisoner from Alcatraz.
The BBC has been unable to independently confirm this.
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In an interview with the BBC, Hopkins described life in Alcatraz, which formed the basis for the film. Stena from 1996, where he befriended gangsters and once helped in plans for a failed escape.
Although the prison was closed decades ago, US President Donald Trump recently announced that he wants to reopen it as a federal prison.
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When Hopkins was transferred to this maximum-security prison in 1955 from an Atlanta facility, he remembers being clean but stripped.
And there were very few things to occupy one's attention - there was no radio at that time and there were very few books, he said.
"You had nothing to do."
"You could walk around in your cell or do push-ups," he says.
Hopkins partly killed time by cleaning Alcatraz, sweeping the floors and polishing them "until they shone," he says.
He was sent to prison in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1952 for his role in a series of robberies and kidnappings.
He was part of a group that took hostages to break through roadblocks and steal cars, he said.
At Alcatraz, Hopkins had some notorious neighbors.
The facility housed numerous violent criminals during its thirty-year existence: Al Capone, Robert Stroud, the murderer known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz," and crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger, who was the subject of numerous films and television series.
A 22-acre island two kilometers from San Francisco and surrounded by icy water with strong ocean currents, Alcatraz was originally a fort for naval defense.
It was reconstructed at the beginning of the 20th century as a military prison.
The US Department of Justice took it over in the 1930s, converting the facility into a federal prison to deal with the large number of organized crime members at the time.
Even in the maximum security prison, Hopkins said he still managed to get into trouble and spent many days in the facility's "D Wing" - solitary confinement cells where inmates who behaved inappropriately were held and were rarely released from their cells.
His longest stay there lasted six months.
He was sent to solitary confinement after he tried to help several other prisoners, including notorious bank robber Forrest Tucker, escape from Alcatraz.
He helped steal hacksaw blades from the prison workshop to cut through the prison bars in the basement kitchen.
That plan didn't work.
Guards found hacksaw blades in other prisoners' cells, Hopkins said.
"A few days after they were imprisoned, they imprisoned me too," he said.
But that didn't stop one prisoner.
In 1956, when Tucker was taken to the hospital for kidney surgery, he stabbed himself in the ankle with a pencil so that the guards would have to remove the chains from his legs, Tucker told the New Yorker.
And then, while being taken for an X-ray, he overpowered the paramedics and escaped, he alleges.
Captured in a hospital gown in a cornfield a few hours later.
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As more prisoners tried to escape from Alcatraz over the years, officials tightened security measures, Hopkins said.
"When I left there in 1958, the security was so tight you couldn't breathe," he said.
All told, there have been 14 separate escape attempts over the years involving 36 inmates, according to the National Park Service.
One of the most famous escape attempts involved Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, who escaped in June 1962 by leaving busts of their own heads made of newspaper in their beds and escaping through ventilation shafts.
They were never found, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded that they drowned in the cold waters surrounding the island.
A year later, the prison ceased operations after the government concluded that it would be more cost-effective to build new prisons than to keep the remote island facility in operation.
Today it is a public museum visited by millions of tourists annually.
It earns about $60 million a year, which goes to the park's partners.
The building is in a dilapidated state, each cell has peeling paint on the walls, rusty pipes, and broken toilets.
Construction of the main prison facility began in 1907, and more than a century of exposure to harsh weather conditions has rendered the place virtually uninhabitable.
Trump, however, recently said he wants his government to reopen and expand the island prison for the country's "most vicious and violent offenders."
Alcatraz "represents something very strong, very powerful" - law and order, Trump said.
But experts and historians say Trump's proposal to rebuild the prison is unsustainable, as it would cost billions of dollars to renovate and modernize it in line with other federal institutions.
Hopkins agrees.
"It would be very expensive. At that time, the sewage system was emptying into the ocean."
"They would have to figure out some other way to solve it," he added.
Hopkins left Alcatraz five years before he was imprisoned for good.
He was transferred to Springfield, Missouri, and given psychiatric medication that improved his behavior and helped him heal his psychological problems, he said.
But this ardent Trump follower says he doesn't believe the president's proposal is serious.
"He doesn't really want to open the place," Hopkins says.
He adds that Trump has tried to "make a public case" for punishing criminals and those who enter the US illegally.
Hopkins was released in 1963 and first worked at a truckers' rest area before taking on other jobs.
He returned to his home state of Florida, where he now has a daughter and a grandson.
After several years of reflecting on his crimes and life in Alcatraz, he wrote a 1.000-page memoir, almost half of which deals with his unbalanced behavior, he said.
"You wouldn't believe the many ways I gave them headaches while I was there."
"I realize now, looking back, that I had problems," he says.
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