Ms. Mitchell was arrested and convicted of grand larceny and sent to prison, which is where, on March 4, 2014, she came to be questioned about her work. In the process, she joined a very specific group: convicted psychics who, seeking an early release from prison, sit for interviews before the parole board.

That number may soon grow. One psychic, Sylvia Mitchell, 41, who worked in Greenwich Village, is serving a prison term of five to 15 years after a grand larceny conviction in 2013. She will be eligible for a parole hearing in 2017. And this summer, a Times Square psychic, Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, 26, was charged with taking $713,975 from a marketing professional from Brooklyn after promising to reunite him with a woman he loved, even after the man discovered that the woman had died. Ms. Delmaro is in jail awaiting trial.

Reviews of transcripts from several parole hearings in recent years shine a light behind the hanging beads of the psychic parlor. The inmates’ reflections on their careers may give pause to the passer-by willing to pay $20 or $50 or more for a promised peek at the future.

“I regret it,” said another fortuneteller, Sylvia S. Mitchell, then 40, at a 2006 parole hearing. “I’m sorry. I regret it and I have no explanation for it; that is just corruption. I look back at it and I can’t believe that I did all these things.”

Sylvia S. Mitchell, who lived in Chelsea, is no apparent relation to the woman of the same name who worked in Greenwich Village. She was convicted of manslaughter after the death of her 85-year-old husband of three months in Manhattan in 1993. She had met him only months before, and admitted to killing him with an overdose of barbiturates to get his money.