48 Xenakis S., Cheliotis L. at times even in active contravention of pertinent legal reforms and at least on one occasion (in the mid-1990s) despite the threat of disciplinary proceedings by the Supreme Court (see further [49, 50, 61]). This is not to imply that judicial resistance has invariably been effective in thwarting legislative reforms designed to alleviate prison overcrowding. Most notably, in March 2015, the then proposed prison reform bill, whose subsequent passage quickly brought about a drastic reduction in the prison population, was staunchly opposed by the Administrative Council of the Greek Union of Prosecutors. The latter complained that proposals contained within the bill to facilitate the early release of prisoners were ‘foreign to penal doctrine’ since their enactment would effectively annul judicial decisions and undermine the fair and proportionate punishment of crimes [52]. However partial, short-lived or otherwise inadequate, the successes achieved through decarcerative legislation carry two important implications for our analysis. First, pertinent scholarship has so far given undue weight to the weaknesses of official administration as an explanatory factor for Greece’s non-compliance with the ECHR. Second, and relatedly, insofar as governments have demonstrated an ability to overcome capacity obstacles, continuing failures of the Greek state to comply with its ECHR obligations cannot but also be a matter of political will (or lack thereof); a point corroborated by the array of self-defeating features found in various legislative attempts at decarceration, ranging, for example, from imposing overly restrictive definitions of parole eligibility, to introducing unrealistic conditions for the conversion of custodial sentences into monetary penalties, to leaving the discretionary powers of judges essentially untouched (see, e.g., [49, 50]). Domestic politico-economic explanations The failure of political will to ensure Greek compliance with the ECHR and pertinent ECtHR rulings requires explanation in turn. As argued in detail elsewhere [43, 62], at least until the beginning of 2015, when a coalition government led by the left-wing Syriza party assumed power, the sustenance of carceral conditions that stand in blatant violation of the ECHR has served dominant politico-economic interests inside Greece. On one hand, in line with what has come to be known in pertinent Anglophone literature as the ‘less eligibility’ principle, whereby the working and unemployed poor are kept in check by being constantly threatened with a fate even worse than their poverty [63], the looming prospect of inhumane and degrading treatment behind bars has functioned to enhance the exploitability of the most marginalised segments of the population in the job market, whether as wage labourers or as reserves. Whilst migrants have grown to be by far the main targets of intimidation under the pretext of political, media and public discourses that routinely securitise them, so much so that they have come to outnumber Greeks in the country’s crumbling prisons over recent years, the primary beneficiaries of this process have been numerous small- and medium-size enterprises profiting through labour exploitation, as well as, by extension, political elites seeking to retain and expand their electoral clienteles through sustaining the conditions for such exploitation to occur. On the other hand, governing parties have sought to deploy incarceration as a convenient means of managing the electoral challenges of disaffection that their regressive socio-economic policies and their continuing impunity towards grand political