One of the last living convicts from the Alkatraz on Tramping Plan to reopen the prison – BBC News in Serbian

Whenever Charlie Hopkins thinks about the three-year period he spent in one of the most famous American prisons, mostly remembers « dead silence ».

Hopkins sent to Alkatraz in 1955. year, a notorious glorious prison on an isolated island along San Francisco coast, as he made problems in other prisons in which he served as a 17-year-old sentence for kidnappings and robberies.

While at night he sinked in the dream in a cell on a steal island, he said, the only sound he could hear was the mermaid of passing ships.

« It’s a solitary sound.

« It reminds you of the song of Henka Williams ‘I’m so lonely to be crying' », « says Hopkins.

It now has 93 years and lives in Florida, and the National Archives of San Francisco informed him that he probably survived a former alkatraz prisoner.

The BBC failed to confirm that independently.

In an interview for BBC, Hopkins described life in Alcatraz, who made the basis for the film Rock From 1996. year, where he befriended gangsters and helped once in plans for a failed escape.

Although the prison was closed ahead of decades ago, American President Donald Tramp recently announced that he wanted to open it again as a federal prison.

When Hopkins was transferred to this Maximum Security Prison in 1955. year, from the institution in Atlanta, he remembers that he was clean, but bare.

And there were very few things, what could be caught up with attention – at the time there was no radio and there were very few books, he said.

« You had nothing to do.

« You could have walked there-, let’s go to the cell or to do push-ups, » he says.

Hopkins partially killed the time by cleaning the alkatrass, the bletti floors and glanding them « until they shone, » he says.

It was sent in 1952. in Jacksonville prison, Florida, due to the role in a series of robberies and kidnappings.

He was part of a group who took hostages to break through the road blockades and the king of the car, he said.

In Alkatraz, Hopkins had some notorious neighbors.

A number of violent criminals were housed in the institution: Al Kapone, Robert Straud, a killer known as a « birdian from alkatraz » and a criminal bare, which was a topic of movies and television series.

The island of 22 mornings, two kilometers from San Francisco and surrounded by ice water with strong sea currents, alkatraz was originally a fortification for maritime defense.

It was reconstructed at the beginning of the 20th century as a military prison.

The U.S. Department of Justice took over in the 1930s, converting an institution into a federal imprisonment to fight a large number of organized crime at the time.

Even in the Maximum Security Prison, Hopkins still managed to get in trouble and spent many days in the « D wing » of these institutions, where prisoners were held inappropriately and rarely released from cells.

His longest stay there lasted six months.

He sent him in solitary confinement to help several other prisoners, among them a notorious bank robber forest taker, to escape from alactras.

He helped steal the saw blade for metal from the prison workshop to cut prison bars in the basement cuisine.

That plan failed.

The guards found the blades of the metal saw in the cells of other prisoners, he told Hopkins.

« A few days after they closed them, they closed me, » he said.

But that did not stop one prisoner.

In 1956, when Tucker was taken to the hospital for the kidney surgery, he stabbed his pencil to take the chains off his legs, told Tucker for him New Yorker.

And then, as they led him to filming X-ray, he defeated paramedics and escaped, stated.

Combating in hospital uniforms in the corn field for several hours later.

As more and more prisoners were trying to escape from alkatraz over the years, officials tightened security measures, Hopkins said.

« When I left there in 1958. years, security was so strict that you couldn’t breathe, » he said.

When everything is comprised, over the years there were 14 separate escape attempts in which 36 prisoners participated, according to the National Park Service.

In one of the most famous escape attempts, Frank Moris and Brothers Clarens and John Anglin, who ran away in June 1962. Years, so you’d left your own heads made of newspaper paper and broke out through the ventilation window.

They have never been found, but the Federal Investigative Bureau (FBI) concluded that they drowned in cold waters surrounding the island.

A year later, the prison stopped working as the government concluded that it would be more cost-effective to build new prisoners than to maintain a stiff island facility in operation.

Today, he is a public museum to visit millions of tourists a year.

He earns about $ 60 million a year who go to the park partners.

The building is in a dilapidated condition, each cell has walls from which the paint, rusty pipes and disintegrated toilets.

The construction of the main prison institution began in 1907. years, and more than a century exposure to cruel weather exposure, she practically made the place uninhabitable.

Tramp, however, recently stated that he wanted his government to reopen and expand an island prison for the « latest and most violent offenders » in the country.

Alcatraz « is something very strong, very powerful » – Order and the law, Tramp said.

But experts and historians say tramp proposes to renew the prison unsustainable, because it would cost billions of dollars to renovate and modernize in line with other federal institutions.

Hopkins agrees.

« It would be very expensive. At that time, the sewage system poured into the ocean.

« They would have to think some other way to solve it, » he added.

Hopkins went from the alcatrase five years before it was closed forever.

He was transferred to Springfield in Missouri and got psychiatric drugs who fixed his behavior and helped him heal psychological problems, he said.

But this fire tramp follower says that he does not believe that the president’s proposal is serious.

« He doesn’t really want to open that place, » Hopkins says.

He adds that Tramp tried to « bring out arguments in public » on punishing criminals and those entering the United States illegally.

Hopkins was released in 1963. years and worked first at the Trucker Resort, before accepting other jobs.

He returned to the Gender State of Florida, where he now has a daughter and granddaughter.

After several years of thinking about his own crimes and life in Alkatraz, Memoire wrote to 1,000 pages, and almost half of that book deals with his unbalanced behavior, he told himself.

« You wouldn’t believe what I’d strangled my headache when I was there.

« I see now, when I look back, I had a problem, » he says.

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