Former prisoner Wil Patterson says it's a myth that nobody in jail asks what you're in for.

He says a person's crime is "the only thing you have in common when you start talking to people".

"Some people won't talk about it. A lot of people, that's all you talk about," he says.

What was Patterson in for? White-collar crime.

He says before he committed his crimes he was an "ordinary bloke", and he believes many Australians could understand the financial pressure he was under.

"I had a wife, I had a son, I had a house in the suburbs, and I had mounting debt and mounting bills," he says.

But not many people would do what he did when a cheque landed on his desk, mistakenly made out in his name.

"The first mistake I made was I put it in my drawer, and I didn't cancel it," he says.

Patterson says he then experienced a feeling straight out of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

"A man murders somebody and buries him under his floorboards, and whenever people come to his house he can hear the beating of the dead man's heart," he says, describing the classic story.

"I felt like that about the cheque."

The cheque didn't stay in the desk drawer — Patterson banked it.

"That night I barely slept. I knew that I'd have to try and make it right the next day and I couldn't do that," he says.

"But then the next day no-one said anything and I still had bills to pay, so I let it clear.

"That was the start that led to the inevitable end."

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Over 18 months Patterson stole $300,000 from his employer, and says his actions came from a place of desperation.

"The problem with breaking your moral compass is that nothing tethers you to your morals anymore," he says.

"And after a week when you haven't been caught and you've worked out that 'here's a way where I could maybe help me make ends meet', you do it one more time.

"But it's just one more time, and then you do it one more time but that's the last time — and then you get used to having the money."

Getting caught

Eventually, though, he got caught. A manager called him into a room, and said: "We need to talk about some transactions."

"I said to them 'OK stop, I'm going to save everybody some time. Whatever you think I've done, I've done it. I did it. I've stolen the money'," Patterson recalls.

"And they all looked quite shocked."

Patterson's first response to his admission was relief: he could finally stop stealing.

"I didn't know how to get out of it and I was I was in such a deep hole, and being caught I mean I had to stop," he says.

He then had to admit to his family what he had done.

"I think that we were living such a lifestyle that my partner — as long as the lifestyle kept going — was wilfully ignorant, was happy to be ignorant about it," he says.

He says that in the months before he confessed, his parents and sister had suspected something was wrong.

His mother and sister took the news of his crimes kindly; his wife less so.

"The marriage was over," he says.

It wasn't until he had been convicted that he told his son, who was 12 at the time.

"He asked me one day 'why can't you live with us?'" Patterson says.

His son reacted to the news by taking a leaf out of his dad's book.

"The year before [he] had an incident where he bullied at school, and I had said to him 'I am so mad at you right now, I can't tell you what the consequences are going to be but there's going to be a consequence because if you do something badly wrong you have to pay the price'," Patterson recalls.

"When I told him what I'd done, he said to me 'you will go to jail, dad' and I went, 'well that's a possibility'.

"He said 'well good, because if you do something wrong you have to pay the price'."

Life behind bars

Wil Patterson served nine months in jail ( Getty: Hizir Kaya, file photo )

Prison life was nothing like what Patterson had seen in movies and on TV.

"I was really worried about going for a walk one day because the two people that I knew weren't around — and you know, you don't go for a … walk in the yard by yourself," he says,

"I eventually built up the courage and I was resolutely ignored by everybody. They obviously just looked me up and went down and went 'white-collar, no threat'."

He says he was mostly relieved, but also a bit put out.

"[It was] a tiny little bit insulting because you know I'm a big bloke," he laughs.

According to Patterson the worst part of prison isn't the food or the isolation — it's having nothing to do.

"The most dangerous thing in prison is boredom," he says.

"Bored men get agitated."

Patterson served his time at Beechworth Correctional Centre in Victoria, a minimum security prison.

"It's got what's called a working prison, everybody's got a job," Patterson says.

"Working makes a massive difference to how you feel about yourself and the world around you."

He says inmates at Beechworth come from all walks of prison life.

"A mix of white-collar criminals like me and people who are at the end of a very long sentence serving out their last 12 months," he says.

"There's a lot of innocent blokes in jail, if you ask them."

After prison life

Patterson was sentenced to three years in jail, and served nine months before being released.

After being in a closed-in, regimented environment, the streets of Melbourne felt very crowded with people.

The ex-prisoner says he wished he had an app that would help him avoid people.

"A weather app that says 'tomorrow it's going to be 14 degrees in Melbourne with a 37 per cent chance of seeing someone you know at Safeway'," he jokes.

Patterson was released at the beginning of 2015, and has since turned his experience into a book, Mr Ordinary Goes to Jail.

He says a lot has changed since that first stolen cheque. He has found love again — and his perspective on life has changed.

"I'm extremely grateful that I went to prison," he says.

"I think I entirely deserved to go to prison and I think it was entirely appropriate that I did it.

"It taught me a lesson… the relationships that I have with people, the relationship I have with my fiancee, and the relationship I have with my son and my family — that's what matters."