Going to jail "for a yard"??

[mrghd]

Hello,

thanks for everyone who helped me with my questions so far. Now I met a problem again in the book I currently read:

Iceberg Slim - PIMP The story of my life

My question is: what does it mean to go to the jail "for a yard"?

Here's the paragraph that contains this expession:

„Old Party had had the funky luck to try the strong arm on a professional wrestler called the „Blimp”
Old Party went back to the joint for a yard after he got out from the city hospital”

Background: "Party" -a friend of Iceberg- tries to brutally rob money from a fightsport-expert, but he gets beaten hard and given over to the police

With the help of urbandictionary.com and thefreedictionary.com (the sites that I strongly recommend for non-native English speakers who have to deal with difficult texts) I got to the consequence that "for a yard" here means for robbery ie. the type of the crime. Am I right?

 

[charliedeut]

Hi,

I found this: The whole nine yards - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Therefore, I would infer that "for a yard" means "for a trifle" or "for something minor" - since the robbery was just attempted and the robber-to-be ended up black and blue.

Greetings,

cahrliedeut

 

[SlickVic9000]

(Not a Teacher)

It sounds to me like 'yard' refers to the length of Old Party's sentence, but I'm not too familiar with this kind of slang, so I don't know how long a 'yard' is supposed to be.
It may not even refer to a specific amount of time. In the US, we talk about 'doing a stint in prison' or 'going to jail for a stretch'. 'Stretch' and 'stint' are terms for a relatively small but not insignificant amount of time.

 

[BobK]

This sounds likely to me. Perhaps its 30 x something. If it was his third offence, it might even be 30 years - but I have no idea.

Slang sometimes assigns strange things to useful quantities ( a 'pony' and a 'monkey' are £25 and £500, though I'm not sure which way round).

b

 

[Tdol]

A yard can mean $100- could it be associated with that? $100 of drugs?

 

[ohthatdeb]

A yard can mean $100- could it be associated with that? $100 of drugs?

I think this is it -- he was trying to get "a yard" ($100) from the fighter, and ended up going to jail for that small amount of money -- not worth it!