Last year, on the morning of November 3, 53-year-old Suzana Deuerling was making a cup of coffee in her pajamas when the police came to take her away. Her flat in Spandau was quiet. Then came the knocking – eight officers at her door. One of them looked at her, she remembers, and said, “If you don’t pay now, we’re taking your freedom.”
She couldn’t give them the necessary sum, so they did. Police officers led her out of her ground-floor apartment toward two vans that were parked in front of the building. Deuerling felt ashamed being watched by her neighbours as she was loaded inside a van and driven away. She was taken to Justizvollzugsanstalt für Frauen Berlin (JVA), a women’s prison in Lichtenberg, and placed inside a small cell with a bed, toilet and barred windows. Her crime? Riding the U-Bahn without a valid ticket.
Sitting in her jail cell, Deuerling didn’t think she had broken the law. The native Berliner claims she had a monthly Sozialticket, the subsidised transport card issued to people receiving government support, but hadn’t filled in her Jobcenter number on the card itself. The day the ticket inspectors had stopped her at Rathaus Spandau – on November 9, 2023, just shy of a year earlier – she was travelling four stops from her home to receive chemotherapy.
It’s a very strange situation: people are imprisoned because they don’t have money, and then the state spends a lot of money to imprison them.
Deuerling was sentenced to spend 50 days in prison, her release falling just before Christmas. Thanks to the work of a group of Berliners who are trying to upend the transit offence system, she would leave after five. Section §265a of the Strafgesetzbuch, the German penal code, was what brought Suzana Deuerling to prison. Introduced in 1935, the Nazi-era offence criminalises what’s known as “Erschleichen von Leistungen”, or “obtaining services by deception”.
Riding without a valid ticket, in other words, is not just a civil offence in Germany – it can also be treated as a crime, if the BVG chooses to report the case to the courts. “[The] BVG only files a criminal complaint if a passenger is caught riding without a valid ticket three times within one year,” a spokesperson for the transportation agency told The Berliner of the company’s internal policy for which cases they hand over to the Staatsanwaltschaft, or public prosecutor.
Once a case is sent over, the prosecutor imposes a new penalty separate from the BVG’s familiar €60 fine. In 90% of cases, there’s no hearing or trial – everything is communicated, like many things in Germany, by mail. Violators can be ordered to spend anywhere from a week to hundreds of days in prison.
The sentence is calculated according to Germany’s Tagessatzsystem, where each day of the sentence is given an equivalent monetary value. Deuerling was sentenced to 50 days; based on her income – she had been jobless since her cancer diagnosis – she was given the option to instead pay €15 per day, or €750. Deuerling hadn’t been able to pay the sum – and this was what put officers on her doorstep.
Five days after walking into JVA für Frauen, Deuerling left as a free woman, her outstanding debt paid by the Freiheitsfonds, or ‘Freedom Fund’, a Berlin-based initiative that has turned an outdated policy into a national conversation. Since its founding in 2021 by activist and journalist Arne Semsrott, the group has raised the money to free nearly 1,300 people.
The campaign began as a one-off stunt on the satirical ZDF show Magazin Royale, hosted by Jan Böhmermann – Germany’s answer to Jon Stewart or John Oliver. The idea was simple: raise money to free 10 people locked up for fare evasion and expose the absurdity of the law.
“After the show aired, thousands of people reached out,” says Leo Ihßen, who works with the initiative as the main person communicating with the prisons to arrange an inmate’s release. “That’s how the campaign really got started. The mandate came from all those people who said, ‘We have to continue.’”
Since then, the campaign has raised more than €800,000 in donations and saved the state – by the group’s calculations – about €18 million in incarceration costs. (The average cost per day to hold someone in a Berlin prison is about €200; if Deuerling had served her full sentence, it would have cost the public over €10,000 to keep her locked up – an astronomical sum compared to what she owed the state.)
“It’s a very strange situation: people are imprisoned because they don’t have money, and then the state spends a lot of money to imprison them. So we say, ‘This has to stop,” Ihßen says. “You go to these prisons – very secure, literally cages – and if the fine is paid, they just walk free immediately. It’s like a magic trick.”
Many of the thousands of people imprisoned nationwide under §265a are among society’s most vulnerable. Freiheitsfonds reports that 87% are unemployed, 15% have no fixed address and 15% are suicidal. “Just by looking at these numbers,” Ihßen says, “you get a picture of who we’re talking about.”
The Freiheitsfonds website offers testimonials from cases they’ve worked with: a trans woman who was sent to a men’s prison, a deaf man whom the prison could not accommodate, a pregnant prisoner and many cases of mental health crisis and people with disabilities, who Ihßen says don’t belong in prison. “They need support, not punishment.”
For many, the fine imposed by the public prosecutor represents a larger burden than it would to the average Berliner. “We know that the people affected by this are mostly those who don’t have enough money – which is why they’re riding without a ticket in the first place,” says Ihßen. “This is, in my view, a clear example of injustice. I’m not very rich myself, but if I were fined by a court, I could probably manage to pay it. I’d be angry, sure – I’d think, ‘All this for a €3 train ride?’ But I’d still pay, and I’d never end up in prison.”
Deuerling remembers the guards at JVA für Frauen saying much the same. “They told me, ‘You don’t belong here. Here are real criminals. You guys aren’t for this place.’” She shared the yard with women convicted of trafficking, assault and even homicide – and a handful of other fare evaders.
“There were women there for three months, five months, just for the card,” Deuerling says, referencing a lack of a BVG transit pass. “They had jobs, they lost them. One woman had to put her child in the system until she got out.” Though the prison was comfortable and she was well-fed, Deuerling spent most of her days in tears.
The Freiheitsfonds team hears stories like this daily – from inmates, from social workers, from prison guards. “Most of the letters we get actually come from inside the prisons,” Ihßen says. “Staff who say, ‘This person doesn’t belong here. Can you help?’” He recounts one case where a woman had fled an abusive partner with her young daughter.
They ended up at a women’s shelter, where staff encouraged her to report the abuse. When she did, police discovered she had an outstanding fare evasion fine, and told her she had to go to prison. Her daughter was left behind. “The shelter contacted us for help,” Ihßen says.
“Think about the whole cycle,” he adds. “Imagine a person who rides without a ticket, let’s say, two or three times. They get reported by the BVG, and then a lawyer starts working on the case. The police are sent to search for the person, and when they find them, they end up in prison because they can’t pay the fine.
That person is usually sent to Plötzensee, the prison in Berlin where most poor people are incarcerated. Then, a prison guard or someone from the prison system sends us a letter asking, ‘Could you please help free this person?’ Because they’re seen as a burden on the justice system.”
But while those tasked with managing the prisons might think fare evaders shouldn’t be there, someone does. In a statement to The Berliner, the BVG said that fare evasion “is not a trivial offence for us” and costs the company about €25 million annually.
“Ticket inspections – which can occur on any mode of transport and at any time of day – are the only effective means we, as a transport company, have to prevent this number from rising.” In 2024, they conducted more than five million ticket inspections and caught 270,000 passengers riding without one. Less than 1% of those cases were handed over to the criminal court, but that still amounts to around 1,700 people.
From there, prosecutors are compelled to pursue the case. “They have to act on it because it’s still the law,” Ihßen says. “But the BVG could easily stop sending those reports tomorrow. And if they did, no one would be prosecuted for it.” In 2023, more than 500 people whom the BVG elected to charge criminally for unpaid transit fares ended up in prison.
The majority of these Berliners end up at Plötzensee, which houses those convicted of Geldstrafen, petty crimes where the penalty determined necessary to compensate for the offence may be paid either via cash, or time in prison. Other crimes that can incur Geldstrafe include shoplifting, driving without a license and public intoxication. In short, JVA Plötzensee might be thought of as Berlin’s prison for the poor. At times, a third of its population is people jailed for fare evasion.
And yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Other cities in Germany have quietly abandoned such crackdowns; the transit agencies in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Potsdam have all stopped prosecuting fare evasion cases. Bremen decriminalised in 2022; Dresden in 2024. “But in Berlin,” Ihßen says, “people are still being jailed. It’s a relic from 1935. It should be gone.”
The Bundestag’s Legal Affairs Committee debated the decriminalisation of fare evasion – which, according to a 2023 report from sociologist Nicole Bögelein at the Institute for Criminology in Cologne, costs the country an estimated €114 million each year – as recently as June 2023.
The BVG declined to comment on any legal debates about the merits of their methods, stating: “These discussions take place within associations, institutions, and politics –- and that is where they belong.” The contradictions, however, are glaring. The BVG’s own slogan is “Weil wir dich lieben” – “because we love you”. “But they hand over names to prosecutors every day,” Ihßen says. “They could stop tomorrow. They just don’t.”
On the morning of June 12, The Berliner headed out to Plötzensee prison for Freiheitsfonds’ Freedom Day. On this day, 23 Berliners were set to be released after having their fines paid off in full.
The area surrounding the jail, on the north bank of the Spree, is mainly taken up by light industry, garden centres and Kleingärten. At first, not finding the correct entrance, we ended up at the Gedenkstätte Plötzensee – a memorial to the victims of the Third Reich – before doubling back and passing the lorries from catering companies and medical suppliers servicing the prison population, idling by the barbed-wire topped brick wall.
What is called Plötzensee prison is better seen as three separate but linked complexes. The oldest and most infamous is the main building: Haus A. This was a Gestapo prison, where members of the resistance were executed during Nazi rule. Until 1937, executions were mostly carried out in the old Prussian style – prisoners beheaded with an axe – before the Nazis brought in the more efficient methods of hanging and guillotine.
Those brick buildings still stand, but have since been expanded to include a prison hospital and, to the southwest, the concrete building of JVA Charlottenburg, a facility with solar-paneled roof connected to the main campus with an elevated walkway.
It was just beside that walkway – at Pforte 1, gate one – that Ihßen had brought €2,300 in cash in a metal briefcase. This was enough money to immediately free five men from the facility. Elsewhere that same day, another seven would walk free from Plötzensee (the funds sent by bank transfer) as well as one man in Tegel and 10 women in Lichtenberg.
The Freiheitsfonds doesn’t claim to be a long-term solution. “We don’t want to be just part of the system; we want to work from outside, positively, and not just clean up their mess,” Ihßen says of the state.” The movement is now watching Berlin’s new political leadership closely.
In May, Stefanie Hubig of the SPD was installed as the country’s justice minister, and Ihßen sees reason for cautious hope. “She supports decriminalisation,” he says. “That’s a small win. What we need now is action.” In a statement to The Berliner, Hubig’s office said that the coalition agreement “includes the goal of modernizing criminal law” to abolish obsolete provisions, but there are currently no specific plans to revise §265a.
Public support, though, is on their side: 69% of Germans favour ending jail time for fare evasion, according to a 2023 poll from FragDenStaat. More than a third of young people in Germany admit to having used public transport without a ticket at least once, and 23% of adults said they occasionally travelled without a ticket, research published in Kriminalpolitische Zeitschrift found.
Still, Ihßen is clear-eyed about the obstacles to changing the system. “The people most affected often can’t speak for themselves,” he says. “They don’t have a lobby. We do this work because someone has to speak for them.” He references a slogan used at demonstrations: Wir sind nicht alle, es fehlen die Gefangenen. We are not all here, the ones in prison are missing.
For Deuerling, the experience has left an open wound. “I was born here,” she says. “But now I just want to leave this country. It’s become really hard to live here.”
