Jelly Roll (Jason DeFord) has said many times that he spent years in and out of jail mainly because of aggravated robbery and drug-related charges.

Quick Scoop: What was Jelly Roll in jail for?

  • He was first locked up as a teenager, around 14, and then cycled in and out of juvenile and adult facilities for almost a decade.
  • The most serious case was at age 16, when he was involved in a robbery over marijuana where a gun was present; he was charged with aggravated robbery as an adult.
  • Over those years, he’s said he was arrested roughly 40 times , mostly for drug possession, drug dealing, shoplifting, and related offenses.
  • For the aggravated robbery charge, he received a long sentence (reported as around eight years with additional probation), but he actually served a bit over a year behind bars plus years of probation.

How it affected his life

  • The aggravated robbery is classified as a violent felony in Tennessee, which meant for years he couldn’t vote and had serious limits on things like international travel.
  • Even after becoming successful in country music, he’s talked about how that old felony still followed him when trying to live in certain neighborhoods or leave the country.
  • In recent years, state officials have moved toward clearing or pardoning some of his past offenses, recognizing how much his life has changed since those crimes as a teenager.

In short: when people ask “what was Jelly Roll in jail for,” the headline answer is that he was incarcerated for aggravated robbery tied to a gun and weed, plus a long pattern of drug and related charges as a teen and young adult.

TL;DR: Jelly Roll went to jail primarily for aggravated robbery at 16 in a robbery involving a gun and marijuana, along with numerous drug-related and petty crime arrests across his teens and early twenties.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.