L.A. Jail is a 1976 album release by Richard Pryor. According to the notes on the album it was recorded live at P.J.'s in West Hollywood, California. The actual details of when and where it was recorded, as well as the question of whether or not Pryor approved of the release of this album are, however, debatable.

(No running times are listed on the album. These times are an approximation based on the watch of this article's original author.)

Although this album was not released until 1976 it was probably made during Pryor’s "transitional period"-- i.e. after he walked off the stage at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas but before he recorded the 1974 LP, That Nigger's Crazy. This is suggested both by the tone and content of the material as well as by the information available about this recording in the Goldmine Comedy Record Price Guide.

Sonically this album is uniformly consistent. There are no significant changes in the character of Pryor’s voice, the level of the volume, or the general sounds of the audience. On several different tracks there are problems with noises and distortion from the microphone which are all acoustically similar to each other. All of this suggests that the master tapes for this album were recorded during one set of performances with the same recording set up, the same engineer, and the same troublesome microphone. It is not, like some of Pryor’s unauthorized albums on Laff Records, made up of sonically inconsistent tracks obviously recorded at different performances and different points during his career.

Two of the tracks on this album are taken from one of Pryor’s previously released albums. Tracks #1 and #7, "Arrested" and "Black Jack," on this album are the same as Tracks #8 and #14, "Cops/Line Up" and "Black Jack," on the Craps (After Hours) album.

Since Craps is known to have been recorded at The Redd Foxx Club in Hollywood this calls into question the assertion of this album’s own notes which state that it was recorded at P.J.’s in Los Angeles. Many of these tracks appear later on the 2005 compilation album Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966–1974) which does include detailed notes. According to the notes on Evolution/Revolution, the tracks on this album which also appear on Craps were recorded at The Redd Foxx Club in January 1971. Those notes from Evolution/Revolution, however, do not include any information concerning the dates or venues for the other tracks which appear on both Evolution/Revolution and L.A. Jail.

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