- 40 B. Prison establishments 1. Preliminary remarks a. prisons visited 86. In 2009, the CPT’s delegation visited for the first time Amfissa, Patras, Thessaloniki and Thiva Prisons as well as Malandrino Prison61. It also carried out follow-up visits to Chios and Korydallos Men’s Prisons and undertook a targeted visit to Korydallos Women’s Remand Prison to examine the progress made in implementing the Committee’s recommendations contained in the report on the 2005 visit, notably, as concerns persons placed in segregation areas, staffing, the provision of health care and overcrowding. In September 2009, these institutions, taken together, comprised more than 40% of the prisoner population in Greece. A brief description of each of these prisons is contained in section 3 below. b. chronic overcrowding and other structural deficiencies 87. In the four years since the CPT’s last periodic visit to Greece, a number of new establishments have been opened and the capacity of the prison estate has apparently increased from 5,500 to around 7,50062. Further, a new prison at Serres is scheduled to start operating in early 2010, and two more prisons should be completed by the end of 2010, notably in Drama and Chania; according to the Ministry of Justice these three prisons will together provide an additional 2,500 places. However, to date the programme of prison building has been unable to keep pace with the increase in the prison population, which stood at 10,95063 at the time of the visit. The effects of overcrowding were evident in most of the prisons visited by the CPT’s delegation. At Korydallos Men’s Prison, the situation remains dire with three or four inmates sharing cells originally designed for single-occupancy. In other prisons, such as Amfissa and Chios, inmates have to share beds or resort to sleeping on a table or on the floor. The situation in these prisons may be extreme but the deleterious effects of overcrowding were apparent in other prisons visited by the delegation, and from the information at the CPT’s disposal it is evident that many prisons in Greece continue to suffer from severe overcrowding. 61 62 63 A brief visit was paid to Malandrino Prison in 2001 before it was operating at full capacity. There are no published figures for the official capacity of the prison system as a whole. This number excludes patients in the three therapeutic institutions (Ayios Pavlos Hospital, Korydallos Psychiatric Hospital and Elaion Detoxification Centre), which were recently transferred to the responsibility of the Ministry of Health.