Failing a criminal action can land you in jail, and jail is not just a timer. It is a whole social system: other players can break you out, you can break them out, and a roster of captured outlaws sits in every city jail carrying a bounty. Understanding how the odds are built is the difference between farming it profitably and wasting a day of energy on it.
A failed criminal action carries a jail sentence of about 2 minutes. While jailed you cannot perform most actions, which makes the real cost of failure the time, not the lost attempt. You can wait it out, pay bail to leave immediately, or hope another player breaks you out, which costs you nothing and earns them a reward.
New characters get a grace period: your first 10 actions cannot land you in jail at all. That exists so learning the game does not mean spending your first session locked up, and it runs out quietly, so do not assume the risk is still switched off once you are past it.
Freeing another player is a genuine cooperative action with its own success roll. The odds are resolved entirely on the server from your stats, your jailbreak rank, the tools you have crafted, and the difficulty of the jail holding them. This is worth stating plainly because the displayed percentage is the real one: the number you are shown before committing is the number the server rolls against.
A successful bust earns you gold, character XP, and jailbreak XP that raises your jailbreak rank, which in turn improves future attempts. A failed one can put you in jail alongside the person you were trying to free, so the risk is symmetrical.
Each of the four city jails has its own difficulty and its own payout, and the two move together. A higher divisor makes the attempt harder; a higher multiplier pays more when it works. Grinding the easiest jail is the safe play, but it is also the worst gold per attempt.
The practical read: work the jail one tier above where you comfortably succeed. The reward multiplier climbs faster than the difficulty divisor across the ladder, so the harder jails are better value per successful attempt for a character who can actually land them.
Beyond the ordinary outlaws sitting in each jail, there are 4 Most Wanted elites, one imprisoned in each of the four cities. They are the hardest busts in the game and they pay accordingly.
An ordinary captured outlaw carries a bounty in the range of 70 gold to 140 gold, scaled by that city's reward multiplier. A Most Wanted elite instead carries a sentence-level multiplier of 10x to 25x on top of the same city scaling, and a successful elite bust then applies a further flat 3x to gold, character XP and jailbreak XP. Those multipliers compound, which is why a single elite bust can be worth more than an evening of ordinary ones.
They also carry a cooldown after a successful bust, so an elite is not a repeatable income stream. Treat each one as an event to prepare for rather than a rotation to farm.
Two mechanics change the odds for everyone at once. A jail riot is funded by players and temporarily raises bust success chances across the board while it runs, with escalating tiers if more players pay to upgrade it. A bust party is an organised group attempt where the participants pool their effort against a single target.
Both reward paying attention to the realm rather than only your own screen. A riot running is the single best moment to attempt a bust you would normally consider out of reach, including an elite, because the multiplier applies to the roll you were already going to make.