Germany: jail for fare-dodging

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

In Germany you can go to prison for travelling on public transport without a ticket. It’s estimated that 7,000 people are serving a jail sentence for this at any one time. Most of them are serial offenders, usually unemployed or homeless, the poorest people in German society. The law that enables courts to imprison people for not paying a fare dates from the early 1930s when it was introduced by the Nazi government. The public transport companies defend its existence. They say they lose hundreds of millions of Euros a year to people cheating on their fares and that it’s important to retain the threat of prison as a deterrent. As Tim Mansel discovers for Assignment, others disagree and are campaigning for the law to be abolished. Most eye-catching is a campaign run by the Freedom Fund, set up in Berlin in 2021, which has raised hundreds of thousands of Euros. Its founder, Arne Semsrott, describes the law as “deeply unjust,” saying it “discriminates heavily against people who don’t have money, against people who don’t have housing, against people who are already in crisis.” Produced and presented by Tim Mansel (Image: Gisa März, who served a prison sentence for fare dodging. Credit: Tim Mansel/BBC)

Transcript

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0:00.0	LiveSless Ordinary is the podcast from the BBC World Service, bringing you extraordinary
0:05.7	personal stories from around the globe.
0:08.5	Search for LiveSless Ordinary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:16.2	Hello and thanks for listening to this episode of the Documentary Podcast from the Assignment
0:21.4	Team. Newspapers are great aren't they? I mean actual physical newspapers where you have
0:27.7	to turn the pages because you find stuff that you might not notice on an app. That's how
0:34.1	I found this story, leafing through a paper one morning earlier this year. A remarkable
0:39.5	story about a man called Anna Zemzrot doing a remarkable thing. Enjoy the podcast.
0:46.2	So what is the ticket cost? So I got to get a ticket both for me and for my bike. So it's
1:00.2	320 and then for my bike it's another 220 so that's 540. I am lucky enough to be able to pay
1:11.8	that but that's already 10. You're listening to the documentary on the BBC World Service,
1:18.4	I'm Tim Nancell and I'm about to get on a train with Anna Zemzrotz, a journalist and activist here
1:25.9	in Berlin. Okay which way are we going? So we will take a few stations on the Ringbahn and
1:36.7	we'll head east. This line is a loop it just runs in a circle all day, doesn't it? Yeah so that's
1:42.5	the line that is frequent at most I would say in Berlin which also means this is the one most likely
1:50.5	to run into ticket inspectors. How often would you say you run into a ticket inspector?
1:58.6	In Berlin I would say if you go without a ticket for a week you're pretty certain that you get caught.
2:07.4	Which is different in other cities so Hamburg for example is much more relaxed about that
2:12.1	and you can see that in their prisons as well so there's way way way more people in prison for
2:18.3	riding without a ticket in Berlin and then Hamburg it's almost nobody. Yes you heard that right.
2:24.6	Prison. People in Germany go to prison for traveling on public transport without a ticket
2:32.4	and not just a few people several thousand a year. In this edition of assignment we're going to
	...

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