inside their cells with nothing to do. At times even, this ‘trip’ to the toilet was not allowed due to severe overcrowding or staff inaction. This was a recurring complaint of detainees at the airport detention facility while I was there as a practitioner. As I observed during my practitioner work, many times, they had to urinate in plastic bottles (Fili, 2013). In a similar pattern, in the absence of permanent medical presence, officers had to filter requests to see an external doctor. All too often, detainees in pain would never see one due to the lack of vehicles or staff to transport them as they were deemed non-urgent cases. Figure 7: The outside area of the Petrou Ralli detention centre As has been argued above, the operation of the centres was based on a security ideology, which saw detainees treated as criminal suspects. Tracing the genealogy of what she calls global apartheid by examining the anti-black roots of US border and immigration policy, Jenna Loyd (2015, p. 12) states ‘Commonsense understandings of criminality, confinement, and race informed treatment of unwanted asylum seekers, discursively rendering them confineable and punishable. The fact of confinement, in turn, effectively becomes the mark of criminality, regardless of criminal conviction.’ In the words of the manager of the Petrou Ralli detention centre, who I interviewed back in 2011 ‘Greece is a 108