Carceral moderation and the Janus face of international pressure 47 Accounting for Greek non-compliance Domestic capacity arguments As already mentioned, Greek non-compliance with human rights norms has been explained in official discourse and socio-legal scholarship alike by reference to ‘capacity’ limitations, with accounts variously stressing resource and institutional constraints. In its official response to the CPT in 2012, for example, Greece invoked its ongoing financial crisis, stating: ‘[There are] well-known fiscal problems that our country [has been] facing [over] the past 1.5 years. We will not get into details, because we think it is self-evident that the lack of financial resources implies insurmountable obstacles to the implementation of an effective correctional policy, as with any other public policy’ [57]. Financial difficulties due to economic downturn have also been evoked by Greek state authorities in an effort to explain away responsibility for the conditions in immigration detention centres across the country [43]. In fact, however, financial obstacles to Greek compliance with the ECHR have stemmed more from the way in which funding is administered than the availability of financial resources per se. Gross underfunding of the country’s prison system, for instance, has a history that far exceeds the reach of the financial crisis which broke at the end of the 2000s, although knowledge of precise budget allocations has been scant (see, e.g., [58]: 205–211). Similarly, the Greek state has long made limited use of EU funds for immigration and asylum management, at least some of which could have been used to ease pressures on immigration detention centres ([43]; see also [59]). Cost-free alternatives to address non-compliant issue areas, such as tackling excessive prison overcrowding by legislating to facilitate the reduced use of pre-trial detention orders and custodial sentences or the enhanced use of parole, have meanwhile been inadequately deployed; a point to which we shall return later. Accounts of non-compliance privileging institutional limitations have pointed to the country’s relatively weak legal infrastructure and inefficient government (as measured, for instance, by the quality of policy-making and policy implementation, the quality of public service provision, and the perceived degree of impartiality and political independence of state bureaucracy) [10]. Scholarship has specifically drawn attention to the weakness of inter-ministerial and inter-institutional co-ordination of domestic structures tasked with ensuring the implementation of ECHR requirements and ECtHR rulings, as well as the political weakness of those bodies and a broader paucity of pertinent expertise (ibid.; see also [26]). It is also clear, however, that opposition by a conservative judiciary has repeatedly posed an ‘institutional constraint’ with which Greek government initiatives to address non-compliant issue areas relating to imprisonment have had to contend, as governments themselves have complained (see further [60]: 283). Attempts by governments to relieve prison overcrowding through legislation meant to either restrict ‘front-door’ entries into the prison system or promote ‘back-door’ releases from it, for example, have usually been undermined by judicial practice. Not only have judges continued ordering pre-trial detention at excessive rates and expanded their imposition of long-term custodial sentences to the point that any gains from decarcerative reforms to other judicial procedures have been outweighed or otherwise undercut. Judges have also persisted in making limited use of options for early release,