Compounding matters, the authorities maintained a carceral approach, often in threadbare conditions, unacceptable even for short periods. For those who had often travelled great distances and already suffered severe privation, these conditions, those within them report, were deplorable and inhumane. Under such conditions, any attempt to offer acceptable social and medical care, was bound to fail. Human rights organisations consistently found dysfunctional or no heating systems, absence of warm water, broken windows, decrepit mattresses, if at all. In the Peplos special holding facility in northern Greece, detainees were forced to sleep on the floor as no beds were available, and for a significant number of detainees there were not even mattresses (CPT, 2006). Similarly, at Isaakio and Neo Himonio border guard stations, too, detainees were provided with dirty blankets and slept on filthy and damp mattresses on the floor, as cells were permanently flooded due to a plumbing defect (Human Rights Watch, 2008). Severe overcrowding was a recurring issue too. Iliadou (2012), drawing on work and research she has been conducting inside the Pagani detention centre since 2005, likens the facility with a landfill, where society’s trash is buried. The facts seem to support this statement. For example, Pagani, on the eve of 2005, was holding 588 foreigners at a capacity of 200 (CPT, 2006). During a CPT visit in 2009 ‘141 women, babies and children [out of a total of 578] were being held together in a room with waste water seeping onto the mattresses, only one small electric water heater available, windows lacking panes, insufficient provision of blankets and a single functioning toilet’ (CPT, 2010, p. 32). As a result, the health and well-being of those detained inside such conditions was severely jeopardised. In 2008, 600 residents at Pagani were poisoned because dilapidated drinking water pipes were contaminated. There were indeed serious concerns about the quality of drinking water and food in all the detention centres on the islands of Chios, Samos and Militini (Medicins Sans Frontieres, 2010; see also Lauth Bacas, 2010) Detainees in facilities in the Attica region did not fare any better as in most cases they were found detained in ‘cage-like compartments’ (CPT, 2006). In fact, a number of ECtHR rulings (Amadou v Greece, 2016; Khuroshvili v Greece, 2013) found that applicants had been subject to inhuman and degrading treatment while detained at the Aspopyrgos detention centre.51 In addition, those at the Petrou Ralli facility were confined to their cells 51 For more details on these cases see Amadou v Greece (2016) and Khurosvili v Greece (2013). 83