On this day in history in 1931, Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion. In light of this event, and also to complement my earlier post on walls in pop music, I ran a marker set comprising terms associated with prison life (e.g. prison, convict, doing time, behind bars, jail, inmate, warden) on the Billboard year-end Top 30 collection (1951-2015). In all, the search resulted in 59 hits in 22 songs. These include both literal and figurative (e.g. "passion's a prison") references. A subset of these songs is presented below (in chronological order). Contact me for a full list of songs. As always, thanks go to Dr. Clayton Darwin and his KwicKwic program for making this work possible.

And bonuses, of course, the first being a clip from one of my favorite bands and then a few by that great singer of (as well as, to) prison life, Johnny Cash:

For prison albums not by Johnny Cash, see this link.