78 European Journal of Criminology 18(1) the adverse effect of neo-conservative culture on state punishment has been unrelated to economic neoliberalisation (see, for example, De Koster et al., 2008). The primacy of economic forces over sitting parties’ political orientation can also be deduced from the small but growing body of literature on the relationship between economic downturn and state punishment, although here the focus has increasingly been on the ameliorative effects the former may have on the latter, particularly as regards imprisonment in the US context over the last decade or so. It has thus been argued that a principal reason why a majority of US states have in recent years experienced an end to the long-term expansion of their use of imprisonment and a reduction in the size of their respective custodial populations is that the fiscal crises they underwent following nationwide economic recessions in 2001 and 2008 facilitated the ascent of politicians with a stronger commitment to budgetary retrenchment and enabled the mobilisation of crossparty support for decarceration on monetary grounds (Aviram, 2015; Dagan and Teles, 2014; Schrantz et al., 2018; but see also Melossi, 2021). The aforementioned study by Karstedt et al. (2019) lends at least partial support to this claim, inasmuch as it demonstrates that states with a higher outstanding debt were more likely to be set on a trajectory towards decarcerative reforms (see also Brown, 2013). One might, in fact, locate traces of a similar phenomenon having occurred more latterly in the UK, where the rate of imprisonment first stabilised and then began to fall during a period of budgetary austerity that itself followed the national recession of 2018 (see, further, House of Commons Justice Committee, 2019; also Box, 1987). On the other hand, once the focus of attention shifts beyond conventional imprisonment to other forms of incarceration, or even when conventional imprisonment is subjected to closer scrutiny, whether in terms of disaggregated levels or with regard to the conditions in which prisoners are held, it is less clear that economic downturn in general and the imposition of budgetary constraints in particular necessarily work to reduce state punishment. In the US, for instance, the recent decline in prisoner numbers has coincided not just with budgetary retrenchment as a result of economic downturn but also with the decentralisation and diffusion of punishment to local and private institutions of confinement, where oversight of conditions and support facilities are scant (Cate, 2016; KangBrown and Subramanian, 2017; Lynch and Verma, 2016; Martin, 2016). Also not reflected in the overall drop in the US prisoner population has been the counter-trend of rapidly rising numbers of confined children and their inhumane treatment, albeit chiefly under migrant detention (ACF, 2020; Nowak, 2019; Peeler et al., 2020). Similarly, in England and Wales, prisoner numbers appear to have fallen while conditions of imprisonment have worsened (Ismail, 2019; Ministry of Justice, 2020; Tomczak, 2019). Although such findings do not cast doubt on the notion that the political orientation of incumbent parties is trumped by economic forces, they do imply that the relationship between political orientation, economic conditions and state punishment is best understood when state punishment is conceptualised in a multi-dimensional manner. In sum, the extant literature offers conflicting findings regarding the impact of either the political orientation of government or economic downturn on state punishment. In what follows, we seek to reflect on the effects that the emergence of a left-led government had on carceral policy and practice in the context of crisis-hit Greece. We begin by discussing the expected significance of the government in question, before going on to