Prisoner Name Generator

Inside, nobody goes by the name on their booking sheet. A prisoner has a legal name the guards use at count, and a yard name handed to them in the first week, usually for something they cannot control: their size (Tiny, Highpockets, Big Lo), their hometown (Tex, Scouse Dave, Hollywood), their crime (the Accountant, Firebug, Safecracker), a habit (Toothpick, Mumbles, Noodles) or a single incident everyone saw (Lockjaw, Two-Time, Lights Out). That is why the most convincing inmate names in fiction are a plain, slightly worn real name welded to a nickname that sounds assigned rather than chosen, like Red in The Shawshank Redemption or Crazy Eyes in Orange Is the New Black.

This list gives you all three layers. There are booking-sheet names with a working-class, multi-ethnic feel (Dwayne Hollis, Maritza Solis, Stanley Wozniak, Kofi Mensah), names with the alias spliced in court-record style (Sal "the Barber" Ferrante, Tasha "Tank" Boykin), and stand-alone handles drawn from prison life itself: commissary food, contraband hooch, sentence lengths, tools, animals, and status words like Shot Caller, Old Head, Fresh Fish and Trustee. Roughly a third of the named characters are women, so the list works for a women's facility as well as a men's.

Pick the legal name first, then let the nickname say what the character did to earn it.