It's not usually all that useful asking actors about the shows they're on, because, you know, they're actors.

No matter how smart they are, they're almost always at the mercy of the writers.

But Stacy Keach, who'll play the warden in Fox's fall thriller, "Prison Break," knows more about life behind bars than even his bosses do, having served six months of a nine-month sentence for cocaine-smuggling back in Britain's Reading Gaol in 1984.

"I knew you'd bring that up," Keach told the reporter who raised Keach's record just now during a press conference for "Prison Break" -- which stars Wentworth Miller as a man who deliberately goes to jail in an attempt to break his brother off of Death Row -- but didn't seem to mind talking about it.

"Compared to Reading Gaol, where I was in 1984, Joliet [the former Illinois prison where the series is being filmed]...is a much more open environment," Keach said.

In Reading, "there were no toilets in the cell, just buckets," he said, recalling the guards' shouts of "Slop out!" each morning.

Other than that, the cells in Joliet are about the same size as those in Reading, he added, stretching his arms to demonstrate how prisoners could touch the two sides at once.

"I think it does change most people," he said. "I think it allows you to recognize what your priorities are in life...Every day is a life-and-death situation when you're in prison."

And then, adeptly bringing the reminiscences back to the show he's here to promote, he noted that the warden at Reading was very much like his character in "Prison Break," a man "very much for the inmates."