88 European Journal of Criminology 18(1) It is impossible to understand why the Syriza-led government failed to make sufficient headway towards improving prison conditions without considering that it found itself severely restricted under the Troika’s tutelage as to both the overall size and the specific distribution of public funding it could utilise for prisons. To illustrate the point, it is necessary first to state some basic facts about the levels and patterns of prison funding per se. For one, while the Syriza-led coalition was in power, yearly trends in budget allocation to the operation of prisons and in actual payments made by the Greek state in this regard largely mirrored the trajectory of the prisoner population itself. To this extent, there was no substantial shift in prison budgets and payments during the period at issue, which obviously put serious limitations on the scope and depth of the reforms that could be applied to prison conditions. What further jeopardised such reforms was the fact that the budgets allocated and the payments made by the Greek state specifically for the provision of basic necessities and capital goods for prisoners (for example, medicines, hygiene products, heating, food, and workshop equipment) were kept meagre, at levels ranking amongst the lowest by European comparison (see, further, Aebi and Tiago, 2018; Aebi et al., 2017). Indeed, although the budget for prisoner-related costs experienced a slight overall rise, the relevant payments actually declined year on year, which, in turn, meant that budget underspending widened on this front under Syriza-led government. The drop in payments and the increase in underspending were especially conspicuous in 2018, when only 64.3 percent of the total budget earmarked for prisoner-related expenses was actually spent, down from 85.2 percent in 2015 and 85.3 percent in 2011.5 What lay behind not just the sluggish trends in terms of budgets but also the decline in prisoner-related payments and the attendant spike in underspending were the economic controls and related pressures the Troika had been placing on Greece in its capacity as the country’s bailout lender. On the one hand, under the harsh terms of the loan agreement reached in the summer of 2015, the Troika did not only afford the Syriza-led government no leeway over budget formulation, it was also able to quash the government’s stated plans to increase public funding for a broad range of badly needed welfareoriented measures. Although the Troika did include reforms to the justice system amongst the public management demands it made of Greece, the reforms in question were focused not on criminal justice, let alone on prisons, but rather on modernising administrative and tax court procedures in order to support economic activity. On the other hand, the Syriza-led government was essentially pushed into a Catch-22 situation, whereby intensification of ministerial budget underspending on a broad array of public investment fronts was the only readily available option it had for making a plausible appeal to the Troika for a desperately needed break from further austerity and at least some longed-for debt relief. Albeit also linked to chronic bureaucratic inefficiencies, budget underspending on public investment was a key way in which Greece had previously managed to meet the stringent targets imposed by the Troika in terms of annual primary budget surpluses, itself a crucial prerequisite for the sustained inflow of tranches of vital bailout funds (European Commission, 2019a, 2019b). In 2018, however, as the devastating effects of continuing austerity accumulated and spread across Greek society, but also with the next national election now approaching, the Syriza-led government doubled down on its under-execution of public expenditure in