Cheliotis and Xenakis 75 Keywords Political orientation, Greece, Syriza, imprisonment, immigration detention, economic downturn Introduction Over the last four decades or so, the spread as well as the harshness of state punishment have increased in many different parts of the world. Yet not all countries around the globe have experienced either or both of these trends, and some of those that have done so in the past appear latterly to have been reversing course. Although an important body of scholarly work has been produced to explain variation in levels and, to a lesser degree, patterns of punishment, especially with reference to imprisonment across or within select Western democracies, no consensus has as yet been reached as to the causes underlying the phenomena in question. More often than not, the ongoing debate has been focused on the ordering of, and the interrelationship between, the array of causal forces that have already been identified in pertinent research, including, for example, electoral interests, pressure-group lobbying, cultural shifts, economic systems, the scale and scope of socio-economic inequality, political and legal institutions, and international human rights pressures. Owing perhaps to the complexity of the task much less effort has been undertaken in terms of scrutinising and, as necessary, broadening the range of those causes thereby arguably risking an insufficiently holistic investigation of the subject. Two variables that have usually evaded systematic attention are, first, the orientation of incumbent governments along the political spectrum, and second, the experience and fiscal implications of national economic downturn. Although recent years have seen both variables receive somewhat greater consideration, there is still precious little research into the effects that they have on state punishment in interaction with one another. With a view to helping fill this gap in the literature, this article identifies the direction and assesses the extent of influence exerted by government political orientation, on the one hand, and by economic downturn alongside its fiscal repercussions, on the other hand, upon the evolution of incarceration in the context of contemporary Greece. In so doing, we offer a uniquely detailed account of carceral trends before and during the period that a coalition government led by the left-wing Syriza party was in power. With regard to carceral trends, the scope of our analysis extends beyond conventional imprisonment to include immigration detention as well; namely, the use of separate, dedicated sites where irregular migrants from non-EU countries are detained for the purposes of administrative procedures relating to their immigration status, specifically deportation and asylum processing. This is not only due to the relationship of operational homology that has increasingly bound conventional imprisonment and immigration detention together, most evidently in the sense that sustained physical restrictions to free movement and other enforced deprivations commonly associated with the former have evolved into a prevalent feature of the latter, too (see, further, Peters and Turner, 2017; Loyd et al., 2012).1 It is also in recognition of the legislative conflation and functional equivalence that characterises these two forms of incarceration in the particular environment of Greece. First and foremost, under Greek law,