the same time as providing an insider’s picture of different periods in the development of the Greek immigration detention system.102 It also draws on in-depth interviews I conducted in 2018 and 2019 with a number of experienced (I)NGO practitioners, researchers, journalists, academics, and activists. Drawing on this range of material, the chapter will cautiously begin to unravel a series of practices that will taint the façade of the humanitarian nature of organisations providing services inside closed facilities in Greece. It will be easy to twist what I write as an indictment of all NGO work. That would be wrong. But it is important to turn our attention away from all the gaps they have indeed been filling and consider their work in a broader socio-political context. While I understand that this account might leave my or others’ work open to challenge, I prefer to see it as a way of accounting for ethical and moral failures. Service provision and challenges of/in detention At a monitoring visit to the Petrou Ralli detention centre in 2018 with a delegation from the Greek National Preventive Mechanism (NPM), we entered one of the wings and quickly became surrounded by a large number of people waiting to speak to the monitors, mainly about their cases. The intense atmosphere on this wing showed a high level of frustration among those who were detained, all of whom claimed that they could not get help from anywhere to understand their situation and why they were being detained. When the monitors told the centre director that his staff and social services should be addressing the problems raised, he shrugged his shoulders and said that the police’s role was simply to guard people and the premises. With that simple phrase, he washed his hands off any responsibility for those under his ‘care’. And yet, if the provision of services was not his job, then whose job, was it? As attested in the previous two chapters, for a number of years, the police had been using invisibilisation strategies to shield the centres from meaningful scrutiny; from not registering new arrivals in order to allow for easier pushbacks to employing empty police For an understanding of detention officers and non-state actors inside detention in other contexts, see Hall 2010; Bosworth and Slade 2014; Fischer 2015; Puthoopparambil, Ahlberg, and Bjerneld 2015; Esposito et al, 2020b) 102 154