Andreas at the airport detention facility demanded angrily. In fact, many officers had confided in me that they did not think guarding immigrant detainees was proper police work; as opposed to being out on the streets fighting crime. It is in this context that police officers rarely engaged in any meaningful contact with detainees, with many spending their shift avoiding contact as much as possible. Rather tellingly, in Fylakio, officers would leave the cardboard box containing breakfast on the floor so women detainees could help themselves. Yet, despite repeated recommendations by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, no efforts had been made either to assign specially trained and dedicated staff to work with irregular migrants or to increase staff numbers. In the years of financial crisis, major pay cuts in the police and armed forces had contributed to growing levels of dissatisfaction among detention officers. Combined with widespread far-right tendencies in the police force, this helped foment a disparaging mix of neglect and abuse across the country’s detention facilities (Antonopoulos, 2006; Christopoulos, 2014; Lazaridis and Skleparis, 2015). The vast majority of detained persons did not have any information regarding their detention, nor any understanding of their legal situation. The only papers they possessed were in Greek informing them that they could be detained for up to six months. The lack of any information in a language they understood left them in limbo about their future and what would happen at the end of the period of detention. More worryingly, in part due to the lack of training but also due to the sheer state of abuse with which detainees were treated, the CPT in 2013 discovered that detainees who had committed acts of self-harm or repeatedly made requests to receive information about their future would be placed in isolation; in a filthy cell with no toilet (CPT, 2014). In the course of this era, incidents of maltreatment, including racist insults and excessive use of force, abounded. Several persons alleged that they were punished with slaps, kicks and blows for making complaints or for committing acts of self-harm. The CPT delegation even found bloodstains in a room in the Filakio centre, where the alleged beatings were taking place, which the authorities attributed to self-harm by detainees (CPT, 2012). In one case, a person in Amygdaleza detention centre who had been taken to hospital to treat wounds caused cutting himself with a glass, was punished on his return by being handcuffed to a fence (CPT, 2014). On another occasion, following a disturbance at 110