centre, which according to him was one of the biggest management issues he had to deal with, he admitted that some of the men detained there had been diagnosed with psychiatric problems.132 He, then, casually said that people who self-harm have to be taken to another island nearby, Leros, and this generates an administrative complication as there are not enough officers available to make this transfer. Later on in the discussion, he admitted that there had been two attempted suicides, ‘but’, he cynically added, ‘you know, they were fake’. The police’s attitude towards self-harming behaviour is supported by the Greek Correctional Code, which views ‘fake attempted suicide and self-harm for the avoidance of a responsibility or to achieve a benefit’ as a disciplinary offence (Article 68).133 The three members of the NPM present in the monitoring visit, shared this perspective, stating that people who self-harm do not do it for real, they do not want to die, but rather to manipulate the situation to their advantage; in other words, to gain something, for example, a release. In the official discourse, there is no recognition of self-harm as an extreme behaviour that indicates distress, nor of the potential for death to occur, regardless of the primary motivation for self-harming behaviour. The rationale is that self-harm is an attention seeking matter that upsets the smooth operation of the institution. By downplaying the importance of self-harm, management is relieved of the burden to address the causes of these acts and puts it on those committing the acts. As Afroditi Kapsali and Mihalis Mentinis (2018) argue, the psychologisation of repression and protest ‘‘sublimate the anger of incarceration into an ‘individual crisis’’’. This process, though at times inadvertently, depoliticises resistance and routinises self-harm. At no point during the discussion did any members of the NPM ask for any statistics on people who self-harm or on suicides. Perhaps, this oversight was intentional, since they would have been well aware that the police do not keep these statistics. Unlike in other countries where there is a specific registry for such acts, in Greece these incidents are registered in the book of incidents (vivlio simvanton), if at all.134 As a former detainee recalls from the time he spent inside the Soufli border guard station ‘I saw many individuals The doctor of the military visits the centre once a week. While the Greek Correctional Code is not applicable in detention centres, police’s practices and the way they run detention centres is very similar and influenced by prison governance. Penitentiary Code (Law No 2776/1999). 134 This book includes the incidences and wrongdoings occurring inside any police institution and requires officers to take urgent action. 132 133 190