Germany locks up roughly 44,000 people across some 170 prisons, and this film follows the ones living and working inside two of them. At Berlin's Plötzensee Prison, Marcel M. is training in the car workshop, a repeat offender who has spent a third of his life behind bars and calls his history of theft "stealing, stealing, stealing, all for the addiction." Correctional officer Helena Emisch, eight years on the job, walks through headcounts, cell searches, and medication rounds, describing her work as "a game of cat and mouse" between staff and inmates. At Vechta, the only women's prison in Lower Saxony, Melanie F. is serving her third sentence, this time for armed robbery, after drug use drove her earlier crimes. She has finished treatment and is training as a painter, and calls the prison her substitute family, saying it saved her even as it was hell. The film moves between these three perspectives to show the routines, work programs, and small negotiations that make up confinement.