730 European Journal of Criminology 10(6) completed, or, conversely, because deportation is deemed unfeasible and the migrant has to be released. Detainees who have applied for asylum and whose applications are still pending at the time of release, are usually issued a deportation order and a note to leave the country within 30 days, as if they had never lodged an asylum application (see further Amnesty International, 2010, 2012c; FRA, 2011; Pro Asyl, 2012). The administrative detention infrastructure in Greece includes two main types of facilities: first, police and border guard stations, which are meant to be used for the purposes of short-term detention and screening of apprehended migrants; and second, detention centres, which are controversially referred to in official discourse as ‘philoxenia centres’ and are meant to hold foreign nationals awaiting deportation. Due largely to reasons of overcrowding, these distinctions are hardly observed in practice, in that police and border guard stations are commonly used to detain migrants for extended periods of time (see e.g. Pro Asyl, 2012). There were six detention centres in place at the time of writing, their combined operational capacity being officially around 5,000, with plans seemingly under way to add new centres and construct extra accommodation at existing sites so as to quadruple the system’s overall capacity within 2013 (Ios, 9 December 2012). These plans are not surprising given, on one hand, the repeated extensions to the legal maximum duration of immigration detention in Greece, and, on the other hand, various reports indicating that the population of immigrant detainees in the country has undergone a rapid rise over recent years and that the total annual numbers of irregular migrants held in particular detention centres (and especially in the centre of Fylakio in Northern Greece) are already well above the official operational capacity of the Greek immigration detention system as a whole (see e.g. Government of Greece, 2012; Pro Asyl, 2007). The vast majority of detainees are kept in the centres of Fylakio, Amygdaleza and Corinth, but further relevant information from official sources has long been unavailable or unreliable. It should be noted here that irregular migrants may also be held in conventional prisons. Over the last two decades, non-Greeks have grown to outnumber Greeks behind bars (amounting, for example, to 7875, or 60%, out of a total of 12,912 pre-trial and convicted prisoners on 1 January 2013), with a significant and increasing proportion of non-Greeks – half of them by 2012, for example – being imprisoned in connection with illegal entry into, departure from, or stay in the country. Albeit a crucial aspect of the broader phenomenon of punitiveness against irregular migrants in Greece, their detention in conventional prisons is not elaborated in this article for reasons of space (but see Cheliotis, in progress).3 Conditions of immigration detention4 Unlike with trends in the use of immigration detention as such, abundant solid evidence has been publicly revealed, if not by the Greek state itself, on the conditions under which irregular migrants are detained in Greece. A wealth of reports produced by domestic and international mass media and organisations, but also a growing body of pertinent scholarship, have demonstrated that immigration detention in the country entails lengthy exposure to conditions that amount to inhuman and degrading treatment. Immigration detention, moreover, Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013