Hinter Gittern

Worker's child, commercial employee, wife, mother, and at 54, a career changer into a completely different field, thus a late-career woman: Marlise Pfander, born in 1950 in Bern, served as the director of the Regional Prison of Bern for nine years until her retirement in 2013. In doing so, she entered a male-dominated field in two ways: on one hand, the other prison directors in Switzerland viewed the arrival of a female colleague with skepticism. On the other hand, the Regional Prison of Bern, which also includes a deportation prison, was considered a challenging "men's prison." The harsh conditions in pre-trial detention confronted Marlise Pfander with human and organizational problems that had been deemed unsolvable for decades. With a lot of heart and great intelligence, she transformed everything, soon being affectionately referred to as "s Chischte-Mami.".