Jailhouse tweets: harrowing, educational, and a bad idea if you're dodging the terms of your sentence. In the midst of his prison term for a fatal DUI, Roger Avary blew the whistle on his own short-lived accidental freedom via Twitter.

Since late October, @avary has been tweeting regularly about prison life, referring to himself as #34 and regaling his followers with tales that will probably turn into a mindfuck prison thriller screenplay someday, because some people are so irrepressibly hip that even imprisonment for a tragic crime turns all cool and A Clockwork Orange-y in their hands.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian wrote about the wayward Pulp Fiction and Beowulf scribe's stream-of-consciousness Twitter early last week.

But then: Plot twist! Milian's blog post led authorities to realize that Roger Avary wasn't in prison at all. Rather, he had somehow ended up on a work furlough program, which allowed him to hold a day job and merely bunk up at night with fellow furloughees. This is both not the hardscrabble prison life everyone thought @avary was describing, nor the prison sentence Roger Avary was supposed to be serving. So guy got nabbed and they sent him to real prison, prompting @avary to tweet:

LAT is preoccupied with how Avary ended up in furlough instead of jail, but what I want to know is, (1) Was @avary faking his prison badassery, since he was never in prison in the first place? (2) If so, was it a ploy to make us think he is irrepressibly hip and A Clockwork Orange-y? Because that would be pretty lame. (3) Alternately: Is the jailhouse equivalent of a work-study program actually as disgusting and terrifying as I always imagined real prison to be? Meaning @avary wasn't trying to deceive, it's just that we soft-bottomed media folks foolishly assumed that his scary tweets were from the belly of the beast, when in fact they represent a relatively pleasant penal existence, and when @avary gets to real prison it's going to get really crazy.

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