Jail, Bail, Bribes & Breaking Out

Land in jail — a failed crime, a busted deal, a RICO seizure, a lost fight that goes wrong — and you're locked out of nearly everything until your sentence runs out or someone gets you out early.

How a sentence is set

The base sentence scales with the offense (4 minutes per tier for a crime, longer for a heist or a RICO bust), then gets a rank surcharge: every rank above Associate adds 5% to the sentence length, so a boss doing the same crime as a rookie serves noticeably more time for it. Every sentence is capped at 4 hours regardless of how the math stacks — even the worst combination of offense and rank can't lock you out for a full day.

Paying your way out

Bail scales with your rank and how much time is left on your sentence — a flat $150 per rank step, plus $30 per remaining minute. The longer you wait, the cheaper it gets to just pay it off. You can also pay bail for someone else, straight from the Jail page — no jailbreak required, just cash.

Breaking out yourself

A jailbreak is a self-service escape attempt: costs 8 Nerve, succeeds 35% of the time. Botch it and you eat 15 extra minutes and 15 Heat on top of your existing sentence — a failed jailbreak is treated as a fresh offense, which can itself trigger a RICO roll if your Heat is already high.

Busting someone else out

Busting someone out is the loud, free alternative to paying their bail: costs the rescuer 12 Nerve, succeeds 30% of the time, and pays the rescuer 5 Respect plus proficiency XP on a clean run. Fail it and the rescuer takes 20 Heat, a 50% chance of landing in a cell themselves, and 30 minutes if that happens — except for a Street specialist, who never gets scooped up on a botched rescue (they still eat the Heat and the seizure risk, just not the cell time). It's the reason a crew wants a Street member on call.