To set themselves apart from the "straight" world that incarcerated them, prisoners have developed an argot that few outside of jail could hope to understand. Thus, for new volunteers who work with prisoners, the New York State Department of Correctional Services recently compiled a pamphlet that included half a dozen pages of current "inmate jargon." A sampling of some of the more colorful terms:
Bug juice: medicine
Cop a mope: get away from me
Ding him: swing sneakily at him
Doing a pound: serving a five-year sentence
Feeb: low on the inmate social scale
Flat bit: definite sentence (a "split bit" is a...