Fake Heiress Says Prison Is 'Pointless'

Anna Sorokin is writing a book about her experience
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 16, 2021 4:33 PM CST
Fake Heiress Says Prison Is 'Pointless'
In this April 25, 2019 photo, Anna Sorokin, who claimed to be a German heiress, returns to the courtroom during her trial on grand larceny and theft of services charges in New York.   (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

Convicted fraudster Anna Sorokin is out of prison—and she does not have many positive things to say about the experience. The German woman, who served 19 months at Rikers Island and 21 months at the Albion Correctional Facility in upstate New York, tells Insider that prison wasn't so bad "as to act as a deterrent for any future crimes," and she didn't see how the experience would help rehabilitate her fellow inmates. "To take people, to lock them up, take everything away from them, and just to expect them to reform," she says. "What is that supposed to do for you?" She says the program to help people transition out of prison involved showing old VHS tapes that advised people to look for jobs in classified ads. "It's just pointless," she says. "It's a huge waste of time."

Sorokin was imprisoned for crimes including grand larceny after pretending to be a wealthy heiress. Her story is being turned into a Netflix series, and she says she also plans to write a book about her prison experience and her take on the criminal justice system. "My point is basically going to be like the pointlessness of the whole thing," she says. "They just wasted everyone's time and money." Marie Solis at Jezebel writes that while people may "dismiss Sorokin’s comments as flippant or remorseless," she is far from the first person to argue that prison fails both at deterring crime and reforming inmates. "Even if you don’t condone her behavior and believe that she really should learn a lesson somehow, it was never prison that was going to teach it to her," Solis writes. (More prison stories.)

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