Series “A Better Place” – Life without punishment

When the prison gates open and the prisoners carefully come out, there is initially happiness, but some also look quite embarrassed. Are they all really free now? Or is this just the strange measure of some psychologists and social workers, a kind of collective suspended sentence?

In the eight-part ARD series “A Better Place,” Rheinstadt, a fictional town in the Ruhr area, opens its prisons and releases all prisoners as part of a revolutionary rehabilitation project. Behind the ambitious “TRUST” project are criminologist Petra Schach (Maria Hofstätter) and mayor Amir Kaan (Steven Sowah). They want to show that prisons can serve as a means of punishment, but are not a way to reintegrate people who have committed crimes into society. The crime rate will fall, promise the two, who do a lot of press work and also appear on television shows. Your project receives media attention worldwide. But of course the two visionaries also face a lot of criticism.

This social utopia attempts to dramaturgically explore how such a rehabilitation project can work or go wrong.

The series “A Better Place”, like the fictional Ruhr metropolis without a prison, is an ambitious project. This social utopia attempts to dramaturgically explore how such a rehabilitation project can work or go wrong. It is of course a problem for the victims of violent crimes when the perpetrators are suddenly at large again and they happen to meet them in the supermarket. Although everyone affected was spoken to in advance, not everyone was actually reached, was approachable or could be convinced.

»TRUST« wants to reconcile people and give them the opportunity to deal with the events – whether as victims or perpetrators – in a different way than courts and prisons do. What can mediation do when it comes to violence that has been experienced or committed? Of course, some perpetrators are insightful and see the project as a huge opportunity, while others experience the group sessions with psychologists, the conversations with social workers and the prescribed professional activity as an imposition.

The young Nader (Youness Aabbaz), who is in prison for a robbery, gets the chance to work in a car dealership, where he really blossoms and immediately falls in love with a colleague. Meanwhile, his sister Yara (Aysima Ergün) is arrested for drug trafficking, convicted and directly accepted into the “TRUST” program. With others, she robs a jewelry store in the style of Pussy Riot and films the action, which soon goes viral online.

Is chaos now reigning in Rheinstadt? The mayor and his team are trying to de-escalate in the press and at the same time increase police controls. How traumatizing is it for relatives whose son was killed by a right-wing extremist thug to meet the perpetrator who, after being released from prison, is repairing the ground on park paths in Rheinstadt? And how much panic is staged online towards the sex offender Jens Föhl (Ulrich Brandhoff) when he is released. How does the social worker from the “TRUST” project, Eva Blum (Katharina Schüttler), deal with the fact that her formerly violent husband is suddenly released and lives at home with her again?

Sometimes these cases seem very contrived and laborious. They show an urban society that is entirely characterized by migrants, in which there is, among other things, a career-conscious, non-white mayor and an Afro-German psychiatrist who is responsible for classifying the individual participants in the “TRUST” project. The community of Arab origin is portrayed in an exaggerated, clichéd way in this story set in the Ruhr area. How this series develops over the length of the eight episodes could be exciting. Based on the first three episodes made available in advance, this is not really foreseeable, but there is definitely potential in the various, interconnected storylines.

Available in the ARD media library.