Getting your article to the top is all about building early momentum. It's easy to imagine a jail if you post at bad times or don't have an interesting title. I've submitted quite a few articles and have seen the difference. No votes will get about 100 hits and an hour on the third or fourth page. One vote could propel you to page one or two with hundreds of hits. It's reasonable to project that it scales from there.
I think the mention of the use of the jail was for banned accounts, not for getting articles to the front page.