Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a long or severe prison sentence.

1929		Hostetter & Beesley It’s a Racket! 227: Hard Time —A long sentence to prison.
1956		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’.
1969		‘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.
1979		(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.
1988		Ice-T ‘High Rollers’ 🎵 Behind any mistake, hard time lurks.
1999		J. Ridley Everybody Smokes in Hell 88: Sweating. Goosy. Good citizen vs. good 24/7 Mart manager vs. hard time.
2002		J. Lerner You Got Nothing Coming 47: I been down, behind the walls all my life, dawg — did hard time all over this country.
2006		B. Matthews Intractable [ebook] [A] prisoner who studied journalism while doing hard time for armed robbery and prison escapes,.
2016		D. Whish-Wilson Old Scores [ebook] ‘Blakey doesn’t want to do hard time – real adult time’.
2019		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).

1927		(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.
1933		Ersine Und. and Prison Sl.
1953		T. Runyon In For Life 166: Still bitter, still doing hard time.
1967		M. Braly On the Yard (2002) 174: Manning did hard time and the time was hard on him.
1972		G.V. Higgins Friends of Eddie Coyle 18: Next time he goes it’ll be two-thirds mandatory [...] and Arthur does hard time.
1990		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.
2002		(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’.