Cheliotis and Xenakis 83 police activity and punitive decision-making on the part of judges, particularly against non-Greeks (see, further, Cheliotis, 2011; Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2010, 2016; Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2013).3 Prisoner numbers kept on growing at such pace over the years that serious prison overcrowding was inevitable. Partly as a consequence of overcrowding, and partly owing to a continuing lack of state provision, conditions of imprisonment grew increasingly deplorable, ranging from insufficient floor space, limited sanitation, and lack of ventilation and hot water, to unsuitable room temperature, poor hygiene and minimal healthcare provision (see, further, Cheliotis, 2011, 2012). Both the problems bedevilling conditions in Greek prisons and the Greek state’s persistent failure to improve them became subject to a long series of damning reports by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) and a host of national and international non-governmental organisations and media outlets. Meanwhile, prisoner unrest and even riots became increasingly frequent, and there was a steady upsurge from the 2000s onwards not just in the volume of applications lodged with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) by prisoners claiming they had suffered inhuman or degrading treatment in Greek prisons, but also in the number of convictions and fines the ECtHR meted out to Greece in this regard (see, further, Cheliotis, 2012; Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2018). Such pressures, however, did little to help reverse the course of the country’s prison policy and practice. Successive Greek governments typically responded to criticism with a combination of denial and defiance (Cheliotis, 2012; Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2018), in a context where the country continued to have one of the poorest records in implementing ECtHR judgments (Anagnostou and Mungiu-Pippidi, 2014). When the Syriza-led coalition was installed in government in early 2015, the Greek prison system was close to ‘breaking point’, as the CPT concluded in a report it produced based on inspection of several Greek prisons at the time. Indeed, the Committee noted that ‘[t]he situation has now deteriorated to the point where over and above the serious ill-treatment concerns under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights [which prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment], there are very real right-to-life issues under Article 2, inasmuch as vulnerable prisoners are not being cared for and, in some cases, are being allowed to die’ (CPT, 2016: 2). The only front on which some substantive remedial effort had occasionally been undertaken by past governments concerned specifically prison overcrowding. Often introduced in spasmodic response to prisoner rioting, initiatives in this regard nevertheless tended to be temporary in nature and purely managerial in orientation, insofar as they were solely meant to deal with a particular practical problem at hand. In terms of content, they mainly consisted of legislative interventions intended at least temporarily to reduce prisoner numbers, either by restricting ‘front-door’ entries into the prison system or by promoting ‘back-door’ releases from it. That prison overcrowding remained severe anyway was because of self-defeating provisions usually contained within such legislation itself (for example, overly restrictive definitions of parole eligibility) and, even more so, due to conservative resistance on the part of the judiciary. That is to say, judges typically reacted to decarcerative blips in government policy by increasing their recourse to long-term custodial sentences, continuing to order pre-trial detention at