Accomplices is a direct, personal dramatic treatment of the lives of women in prison. Margit Czenki, in her first film, works with material that is all too familiar to her: the former teacher of handicapped children served a five-year prison term for armed robbery as a member of a radical political group (her story was related to Margarethe von Trotta in The Second Awakening of Christa Klages). Pola Kinski portrays Barbara, sentenced to seven years for robbery. After two years in solitary confinement, where she was subject to fits of rage, Barbara begins working in the prison sewing workshop. There she becomes integrated into the world of guilt and anger, as well as the jealousy and hypersensitivity, of the women, many of them mothers, and most of them serving time for murder. Barbara becomes an "accomplice" in their artful schemes to dodge the prison routine and their own pain.