- 70 145. The CPT has recommended in the past that the Greek authorities devise special rules for visits to prisoners held in difficult-to-access establishments, but no action has been taken on this issue to date. In 2009, the CPT’s delegation visited Chios and Malandrino Prisons and, not surprisingly, their geographical isolation resulted in the fact that few prisoners received visits. Moreover, many prisoners find themselves serving their sentences a long way from their families, as the Greek prison service does not allocate prisoners to an establishment close to their home or place of social rehabilitation (as provided for in Rule 17 of the 2006 revised European Prison Rules). In such circumstances, the provision of 30 minutes of visit time per week is somewhat meaningless; instead, prisoners should be allowed to accumulate any unused visiting periods in order to promote meaningful contact between an inmate and his/her family and to justify the long journeys travelled by visitors. The authorities should also look into possible forms of assistance to enable families of such prisoners to make use of the visiting possibilities. The CPT recommends that the Greek authorities draw up special visiting arrangements both for difficult-to-access prisons and for those prisoners serving their sentence in an establishment far from their home, which should address inter alia the accumulation of visiting time and possible forms of assistance to visitors. 146. Articles 54 to 56 of the 1999 Prison Law regulate the possibility of prisoners to be granted home leave for periods of one to five days every two months, not exceeding 40 days per calendar year89. Prisoners must serve one-fifth90 of their sentence before they may apply to the Prison (Disciplinary) Council, composed of the Prison Director, the prosecutor responsible for the prison and a prison social worker. According to the Law, the Prison Council will assess the prisoner’s personality and behaviour in prison as well as his family and social status, and whether the home leave might be beneficial for his reintegration into society. In all the prisons visited, inmates were vociferous in their complaints about the home leave system, primarily because the whole process appeared to them neither transparent nor objective. This was particularly the case in Patras Prison, where the standard response to most applications for home leave was “does not provide sufficient guarantees for his behaviour”, no specific reasons being provided. It was also evident that the lack of social workers in each prison91 meant that it was not possible to fully analyse the family arrangements of each applicant. Further, any evaluation of their behaviour in prison was somewhat superficial given that there was no daily interaction between staff and prisoners. 89 90 91 Law 3727 of 18 December 2008 extends the periods of home leave to six days every two months and a maximum period of 46 days per calendar year. The two-fifths requirement for all prisoners sentenced for drug-related offences has been amended by Law 3727 of 18 December 2008, and now only applies to those persons sentenced for serious drug-related offences (as defined by Law 3459/2006, Articles 23 and 24). For example, Malandrino Prison had originally provided for four social worker posts for 280 prisoners but, at the time of the visit, there were only two persons in post for an inmate population of 444.