When Charlie Hopkins recalls his three years of spending in America's most famous three years Prison, he remembers the most "fatal quiet".

In 1955, Hopkins was sent to a prison on an isolated island off the coast of San Francisco - a sentence of 17 years for kidnapping and robbery after other prisons caused trouble.

He said he fell asleep in a cell on a remote island at night, with the only sound of the boat passing by.

"It's a lonely voice," Hopkins said. "It reminds you of Hank Williams singing that song, 'I'm so lonely, I can cry.'"

Now 93, who lives in Florida, Hopkins said the San Francisco National Archives told him that he might be the last surviving former demon prisoner. The BBC cannot independently verify this.

Hopkins described life in Alcatraz in an interview with the BBC this week, where he made friends with the gangsters and once helped plan a failed escape. Despite the closure decades ago, President Donald Trump recently claimed that he wanted to reopen it as a federal prison.

When Hopkins moved from his Atlanta facility to a high-security prison in 1955, he remembered it was clean but barren. He said there were no radios at the time and there were few books and very few.

“There’s nothing to do,” he said. “You can walk back and forth in the cell or do push-ups.”

He said Hopkins was busy with part of his work while cleaning Alcatraz, sweeping the floor and "until shining."

In 1952, he was sentenced to jail for his role in a series of robberies and kidnappings. He said he was part of a group of people who took hostages, stole obstacles and stole cars.

On Alcatraz, Hopkins has some notorious neighbors. The facility has housed many violent criminals in its 30 years - Al Capone; Robert Stroud, the murderer known as the "Birdman of the Demon Bird"; and crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger - making it the subject of many movies and TV shows.

A 22-acre land of 1.25 miles (2 km) from San Francisco and surrounded by cold currents, Alcatraz Island was originally a Navy Wehrmacht. It was rebuilt in the early 20th century as a military prison. The Justice Department took over it in the 1930s, turning the facility into a federal prison to address the issue of organized crime at the time.

Even in a high-security prison, Hopkins said he still managed to get into trouble and spent many days in the facility's "Block D" - lonely prisoners - possessing misconduct were held and rarely released from the cell.

Hopkins said he had been there for the longest time — six months — in his attempt to help several other prisoners, including infamous bank robber Forrest Tucker, escape Alcatraz. He helped steal the plug-in blades from the prison’s electric store to cut off the prison bar in the basement kitchen.

Hopkins said the program did not work properly - prison guards found blades in other inmates' cells. "A few days after they locked them, they locked me up," he said.

But that didn't stop one of the prisoners.

Tucker told The New Yorker that in 1956, when Tucker was taken to the hospital for kidney surgery, he stabbed his ankle with a pencil so that the prison guards had to remove the iron rod in the leg. Then, when he was taken away from the X-ray, he overwhelmed the hospital order and ran away.

A few hours later, he was arrested in a hospital gown in Cornfield.

Hopkins said officials have improved safety as more inmates try to escape Alcatraz.

"When I left there in 1958, the safety was too tight for you to breathe," he said.

According to the National Park Service, there have been 14 separate attempts over the years involving 36 prisoners. The most famous brothers, Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, escaped paper in June 1962, placed the paper with the head of the Trojan horse on their bed and burst through ventilation ducts. They were never found, but the FBI concluded they were drowned in the cold water around the island.

The prison was closed a year later after the government decided to build a new prison than to keep the remote island facilities in operation.

Now, it is a publicly operated museum with millions of dollars visits each year, bringing about $60 million in revenue to park partners.

The building is aging, with peeling paint, rusty pipes and shaky toilets in every narrow cell. Construction of the main prison facility began in 1907, with more than a century of elemental contact making the place nearly uninhabitable.

But Trump said this week he hopes his administration reopens and expands the island prison for the country's "most cruel and violent criminals."

Trump said the demons “represent something very powerful, very powerful” – law and order.

But experts and historians say Trump's proposal to re-establish a prison is far-fetched, as it will cost billions of dollars in repairs and updates with other federal facilities.

Hopkins agreed. "It's going to be so expensive," he said.

“At that time, the sewage system entered the ocean,” he added. “They had to come up with another way of dealing with it.”

Hopkins left Alcatraz five years before permanently closing. He said he had been transferred to a prison in Springfield, Missouri and received psychiatric medications that improved his behavior and helped him heal his psychological problems.

But avid Trump supporters say he doesn't think the president's proposal is serious.

"He really doesn't want to open that place," Hopkins said.

Hopkins was released in 1963 and worked at the truck station before engaging in other jobs. He returned to his hometown of Florida and now has a daughter and grandson.

He said he has reviewed his crimes and life on Alcatraz for decades, writing a 1,000-page memoir, with nearly half of his book detailing his troubled behavior.

"You won't believe the trouble that I'm causing them when I'm there," he said. "I can see now, looking back, I have a problem."