An 18-year-old girl moves out of the apartment. The mail keeps coming to his parents' house and no one opens it. CFF fines accrue without her knowing it. One day they tell him that he has to go to prison for six days. They arrive at the penitentiary and discover more fines pending: the six days become twelve. That's what happened in the real life of Carmela, now 33 years old. Fifteen years later, she says it was like suddenly finding herself in a completely different world, cut off from the outside overnight.
In 2024, more than one out of every two incomes in prison in Switzerland was for substitute penalties of unpaid fines. Not for felonies. For fines. The canton of Bern, with prisons at 103% occupancy, is now asking that those sentences can be served as work of general interest. Which says a lot about how the situation is.
The mechanism is as follows: if you are checked without a ticket, you receive a fine from the CFF. If you don't pay it, the matter goes to court and becomes a criminal law fine. If you also do not pay that, the judge issues a substitute sentence of deprivation of liberty. And in Switzerland, that penalty is executed. There aren't many additional notices. The mail arrives, and if you don't open it or update your official address, the process continues anyway.
What is striking in these testimonies is not only the severity of the consequence but how easy it is to fall into that situation without having realized that things got worse. Changing floors without updating the registered address, ignoring a fine thinking that it will resolve itself. In Switzerland that has a fairly predictable trajectory.