Between eight and nine thousand: this is the rough number of people who go to jail in Germany each year for failing to pay a public transportation ticket. Once discovered, passengers are asked to pay a fine, which normally amounts to €60 ($70). Those who can’t pay and see the fines build up face a prison sentence of up to one year. Unsurprisingly, it is mainly the poor who end up in jail. According to the Freiheitsfonds (Freedom Fund), which campaigns in favor of those incarcerated for fare evasion, 87 percent are unemployed, 15 percent do not have a home, and 15 percent are at risk of suicide. Compounding the problem, many of the people imprisoned have lost their homes by the time they come out again.

Section 265a of the German Criminal Code, the legal provision responsible for punishing fare dodgers so severely, was first introduced in September 1935, more than two years after the Nazis took power. Nicole Bögelein, a criminologist at the University of Cologne, told me about the historical origins of Section 265a. She comments that the measure originally aimed not to prevent transport fraud but to reduce “the misuse of a coin-operated telephone.” At the time, “the misuse of vending machines was considered the ‘most frequent and economically most dangerous type of service fraud.’”