Greek authorities to refurbish many of the establishments, by the end of 2009, no significant improvements had been observed, leaving the structural deficiencies of the facilities unaddressed. Unfortunately, the next era of detention politics would paint an even bleaker picture. Conclusion In this chapter, I trace the roots of today’s destructive detention system back to the beginning of 1990s, when the Greek state established the laws and policies to respond to the first large immigration movement to the country and deter new arrivals. Nationalism in Greek political culture, or the historical depths of the ultra-right’s intrusion into the Greek state apparatus, established the legal and institutional basis for today’s detention regime. This nationalism is intimately linked to racialised border controls and cannot be decoupled from racism against foreigners in the country (Bhui, 2016). As has been argued by Michaela Benson (2020, p. 504), reasserting a nation state’s borders is built upon antiimmigration rhetoric focused on Black and Brown migrant Others’ seeking to cross Europe’s borders. Adopting an approach of longer Greek histories of racialisation and racism, unlike later accounts of detention, which claim that it became a key measure for policing migration after 2010, I argue that detention formed the core aspect of border policing in Greece decades earlier, as successive governments have sought to deter irregular migrants and secure the nation’s borders. Indeed, the detention system was built across party lines, informed by different political beliefs (Karamanidou, 2014). The history that I trace in this first chapter also points to the central role that the police have played in building, feeding and protecting the detention estate. Drawing on the discussion above, police practices inside detention centres could be characterised as inconsistent, poorly grounded, arbitrary, corrupt, brutally violent and cloaked in a veil of impunity. Yet, the police could not have produced an atrocious detention regime without conducive social conditions; i.e without drawing on the inertia and/or the consent of the official state. Together with other state authorities and the judiciary, they have managed to obscure the location of those early detention sites, as well as the violence that has been nurtured inside the migration carceral apparatus. There is a continuous history of systematic corruption and abuse by Greek state officials, in consulates, ministries, the police, and other agencies - this also includes the trafficking 91