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Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

In Germany are about 1/3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket. If you can't pay you will end up in prison. Imagine how much money this does cost.

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This seems like a made up number. This article here states that it is at most 10% of all people even in that category of crime in Bavaria https://netzpolitik.org/2022/datenluecke-wie-viele-menschen-...

The category being "Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe" (imprisonment for failure to pay a fine)

Do you have a source for your claim?

If your numbers are true, and 10% of the prison population consists of people who didn't pay their bus fare, that is egregious

The 10% are in the category of "Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe" which are is "imprisonment for failure to pay a fine"

The article is about the lack of more fine-grained data in that category

You don't get it. The fines are HUGE and the prison sentences really short.

So what do you choose? Pay x000 euro? Or go to prison for 1 day, a week at most? There are a substantial number of people picking the second option. Hell, people joke it's about the experience.

(Also this is in fact mostly about speeding tickets, not public transport fares)

Bavaria is the second most well off state so it seems a little unreasonable to assume the average numbers must be near that. These are the kind of crimes disproportionately concerning the poor.

I was also curious about this statement. According to wikipedia, one third of the Plötzensee Prison inmates are there due to fare evasion. Or rather, they were when the articles that wikipedia cites were written. Of course, being a juvenile prison in Berlin, it might have the highest rate of fare evader inmates of any prison in the country (which would explain why the articles write about that prison specifically).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plötzensee_Prison

https://taz.de/135-Schwarzfahrer-hinter-Gittern/!5134051/

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/jeder-dritte-in-plotzense...

> In Germany are about 1/3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket.

I think this could be read two ways:

> In Germany, 1/3 of the total population is in prison because they used a train or bus without a ticket.

> In Germany, 1/3 of the total prison population is there because they used a train or bus without a ticket.

I suspect you mean the second, just noting that it could be misunderstood. (Please correct me if I'm mistaken!)

It's ambiguous but first interpretation can be ruled out immediately because it can't possibly be true.

Is this 1/3 of the current prison population, or is it 1/3 of prison sentences handout in a certain period?

I could believe the latter.

But I assume that sentences for fare evasion are shorter than for other types of theft, or more serious things like murder?

Sadly population

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/germany

This is wildly inaccurate.

The population of Germany is about 84m. The total prison population in Germany is 56557. [1]

What are you talking about?

[1]: https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/germany

Not OP but I believe they're talking about the total prison population and not the total population. They're saying that roughly 19,000 people (roughly 1/3 of 56,557) are in prison in Germany due to the inability to pay a fine that was given to them for riding on a train or bus without a ticket.

I'd want to see a citation on that, only thing I could find so far is this quote "Peter Biesenbach, justice minister in Germany's most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia, said that over one-in-ten verdicts handed down in his state dealt with fare-dodgers."

I can't imagine that 1 in ten verdicts for fare dodging would result in one third of the prison population being fare dodgers.

I am German and support the degradation of this "crime" to a delict, but even if 1/3 of the emprisoned is there bc of riding without a ticket, which I can hardly believe without a source, you leave out a very important aspect. Most if not all of those aren't emprisoned because they were caught 3 times without a ticket, but because they were on probation when they were caught. Most of those got probation immedeately in court. The law was created in the 1930s by the Nazi government because people "hacked" the new ticket machines, which weren't as secure as today. This wasn't an issue before when selling tickets was done by humans. Sadly western Germany always has been too conservative to change it, the reunification would have been a good chance to overthink every law that originated from the 3rd Reich.

I'd rather ride the U-Bahn in Munich than the subway in NYC.

Yes, and I'd rather go to prison in Munich than to Rikers Island.

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