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...