"I want to help build a transitional home so that when inmates leave here they don't have to go back to the street," she told E! News' Ryan Seacrest from jail last week.
She also said she'd like to change her image. "I used to act dumb. It was an act. I am 26 years old, and that act is no longer cute," Hilton told Barbara Walters.
She revealed more details in a post-jail interview with People magazine, on newsstands tomorrow. Excerpts were posted yesterday on People's website. Hilton said doctors observing her thought she was having "severe anxiety, panic attacks, claustrophobia." She added that during her first few days behind bars, "I was basically in the fetal position, basically in hysterics."
Her medical condition prompted Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca to transfer Hilton to home confinement just days into her sentence, igniting furious debate over celebrity treatment in the jail system.
Hilton has said she was "shocked" by the attention given to her case.
To help reshape her image, Hilton has enlisted crisis management expert Michael Sitrick, whose Los Angeles firm has represented talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, singer R. Kelly , and drummer Tommy Lee. She tells those who doubt her sincerity: "They're wrong, and they don't know me. I'm a good person. I'm a compassionate person. I have a big heart. I'm sincere, and they'll see," she told People.
For now, however, the image splashed on the Internet, television , and in newspapers has been of her red-carpet style exit from jail, strutting past the assembled masses, wearing tight jeans and white stiletto heels , and slapping hands with sheriff's deputies holding photographers at bay.
At her grandparents' mansion, more than a dozen cars pulled up and were quickly buzzed inside, while photographers and journalists waited for any sign of Hilton.
Hilton's path to jail began Sept. 7, when she failed a sobriety test after police saw her weaving down a street in her Mercedes-Benz. Hilton, who said she was hungry and on the way to get a hamburger, pleaded no contest to alcohol-related reckless driving and was sentenced to three years' probation. In the months that followed she was stopped twice by officers who discovered her driving with a suspended license. The second stop landed her in court and then in jail.
