The expression to Be Screwed is widely used to mean being cheated, or placed at a disadvantage. English prisons in the 1800s were intended to be cruel places of punishment in order to deter people from returning. One of these punishment was to force a prisoner to turn a crank handle up to 10,000 times in a day. These handles were designed so that the hard labour could be made even worse by a warder turning a simple screw that increased the resistance of the handle. In such horrific places, bribery was very common and any prisoner who didn’t, or couldn’t, agree to a warder's demands could find himself being “screwed” the next time he was on the handle.