Green’s Dictionary of Slang

hard time n.

[SE hard + time n. (1)]
(orig. UK Und.)

1. a long or severe prison sentence.

[US]Hostetter & Beesley It’s a Racket! 227: Hard Time —A long sentence to prison.
[US]N. Algren Walk on the Wild Side 16: They [...] boasted of their time in jail. Hard time and easy, wall time and farm time, fed time and state, city time, county time, short time and good time, soft time and jawbone time, big house, little house and middle house time, industrial time and meritorious time — ‘that’s for working your ass off’.
[US]‘Iceberg Slim’ Pimp 44: There were several repeaters [...] who tried to bug the first offenders with terrible stories about the ‘hard time’ up at the reformatory.
[US](con. c.1970) G. Hasford Short Timers (1985) 157: The judge gave me a choice between the Crotch and hard ime in a stone hotel.
[US]Ice-T ‘High Rollers’ 🎵 Behind any mistake, hard time lurks.
[US]J. Ridley Everybody Smokes in Hell 88: Sweating. Goosy. Good citizen vs. good 24/7 Mart manager vs. hard time.
[US]J. Lerner You Got Nothing Coming 47: I been down, behind the walls all my life, dawg — did hard time all over this country.
[Aus]D. Whish-Wilson Old Scores [ebook] ‘Blakey doesn’t want to do hard time – real adult time’.
[US]D. Winslow Border [ebook] A stint in juvie, not hard time upstate.

2. having trouble serving a sentence, suffering while in jail (whether from the regime or from self-inflicted problems).

(con. 1915) P.C. Murphy Behind Gray Walls 50: He soon began doing what the prisoners call ‘hard time,’ that is, brooding and worrying over his sentence.
[US]Ersine Und. and Prison Sl.
[US]T. Runyon In For Life 166: Still bitter, still doing hard time.
[US]M. Braly On the Yard (2002) 174: Manning did hard time and the time was hard on him.
[US]G.V. Higgins Friends of Eddie Coyle 18: Next time he goes it’ll be two-thirds mandatory [...] and Arthur does hard time.
[Aus]Tupper & Wortley Aus. Prison Sl. Gloss. 🌐 Doing it easy/hard. Descriptive of the pains of imprisonment. Thus, ‘doing it hard’ means a prisoner can not settle into or accept his sentence.
[US](con. 1998–2000) J. Lerner You Got Nothing Coming 200: Spoony, all of eighteen, is doing four to ten [...] worrying if she’s been with someone, if she is with someone at this very moment — and who is it? [...] Spoony’s doing ‘hard time’.

In phrases

give someone a hard time (v.)

(US) to harass.

[US]J. Stearn Sisters of the Night 57: When a John gave them a hard time, I’d go after him with a [baseball] bat.
[US]H.S. Thompson letter 13 July in Proud Highway (1997) 58: Banks gave the waitress a hard time for not calling him the new Aga Kahn.
[US](con. 1953–7) L. Yablonsky Violent Gang (1967) 53: I liked you right away [...] So I figured why give you a hard time?
[WI]S. Naipaul Fireflies 272: Every meeting he hold they does come by the busload just to heckle and give him a hard time.
[US]J. Ellroy Brown’s Requiem 57: He used to hang out at 77th Street and buttonhole Cathcart, give him a hard time.
[UK]K. Sampson Powder 43: He’d never given the old man a hard time.
[UK]K. Waterhouse Soho 182: He hoped the police weren’t about to give him a hard time.