Cheliotis and Xenakis 89 order to exceed what by that point was the highest Troika-mandated fiscal target of its tenure in office; that is, a primary budget surplus of 3.5 percent of GDP (European Commission, 2019a: 21). Indeed, no other Greek government in the bailout era had underused public investment budgets to the extent that the Syriza-led coalition did that year (see, for example, European Commission, 2019b: 20). The rationale underlying this seemingly absurd move was that over-achieving so high a fiscal target would help persuade the Troika that further austerity measures were no longer necessary (most notably in the form of scheduled pension cuts) and that debt relief was at last feasible in the Greek case. To this extent, persisting problems in prison conditions were yet another form of collateral damage in the Syriza-led government’s ongoing struggle against its international creditor for a stable and sustainable domestic economy, as well as for a halt to further degradation in the living conditions of the average Greek person. All in all, then, the prison reform aspirations of the Syriza-led coalition government – or, to be more precise, of Syriza as the senior partner of the coalition – were mostly crushed between the Scylla of judicial obstinacy and the Charybdis of external economic intervention. Throughout its stay in office, Syriza kept on trying to push through its reform agenda, albeit, of necessity, mainly by way of sporadic and smallscale measures that were beyond the grasp of either the judiciary or the Troika (for example, repurposing existing resources to strengthen drug rehabilitation programmes in some prisons). Although the party and, by extension, the government in practice continued treating the Troika as an invincible force, they did eventually seek to fight back against, and enforce limits to, the obstructive discretionary powers of judges by passing an amendment to the country’s Penal Code that reduced maximum sentence lengths. But this move, carried out as late as 2019, turned out to be no more than a parting shot; it was, in fact, the last major legislative action taken by the Syriza-led coalition on any policy front before the elections that brought it down in July that year. No sooner did right-of-centre New Democracy return to power than it began undoing key legislative and other measures through which its predecessor had endeavoured to change the Greek prison system for the better. Migrant detention and human rights before Syriza In the 1980s, Greece transformed from a country of emigration to a country of immigration, albeit predominantly as one of the main gateways to the EU for irregular migrants. Over the following three decades, the country proceeded to take an obstructive position on regularisation and, more generally, to resist the establishment of administrative capabilities that would ensure the management of irregular migration in an efficient and effective fashion. When the financial crisis broke in the late 2000s, the rate of asylum applications to Greece was the highest in Europe, whilst the country maintained one of the lowest rates of refugee recognition on the continent and one of the highest rates of pending asylum cases worldwide (Cheliotis, 2013, 2017). Meanwhile, although there is no clarity as to the precise numbers of irregular migrants held in administrative detention at the time, conditions of migrant detention had given rise to increasing alarm amongst national and international human rights bodies. Human Rights Watch and CPT reports, for example, repeatedly told of