Cheliotis and Xenakis 85 With memories still very much alive of US targets having been attacked by November 17, the US government also weighed in to push against the passage of the bill. To start with, US Secretary of State John Kerry conveyed his country’s concerns in a phone-call directly with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, as did the US Ambassador to Athens, David Pearce, in the communication he had with the Greek Minister of Justice. Realising that private diplomatic efforts of this kind were to no avail, however, the Americans began to increase their pressure on the Greek side and to do so in the public eye. Most notably, on the morning of the very day that the bill was tabled in parliament for a final vote, Ambassador Pearce held a widely covered press conference about the matter, during which he condemned the early release provisions of the bill in general and urged the Greek government to shut down any prospect of Xiros being paroled in particular. ‘If Savvas Xiros – or anyone else with the blood of American diplomats and US Mission members on their hands – leaves prison, it will be seen as a profoundly unfriendly act. . . . We believe this legislation is inconsistent with [our] partnership [with Greece]’, he characteristically said (Ovenden, 2015: 144; see also Smith, 2015). There was little doubt Pearce’s intervention contained a lightly disguised threat that the Greek government would be denied the support it had been hoping to obtain from the Americans in what had meanwhile become drawn-out negotiations with European creditors to save its debt-stricken economy from collapse. All this pressure notwithstanding, and with the junior coalition partner’s support secured, the bill did pass as proposed.4 The saga was far from over, however. In light of the discontent already openly expressed by the US, the leading opposition party and the phalanx of media outlets that were friendly to it doubled down on their criticism against the Greek government’s prison reform plans, now claiming that the senior coalition partner’s alleged sympathy for criminals and terrorists was not just putting public security at risk, but was also, more broadly, jeopardising the country’s geopolitical interests and economic prospects (see, for example, Kathimerini, 21 April 2015). Further fuel for such views was provided by the Americans themselves, who instantly responded to the passage of the bill with renewed public expressions of dismay and concern. When, against this background, the issue was brought up in a televised interview with the Greek Prime Minister, the latter sought to reassure the public that ‘the difference in views about the Xiros case has not harmed Greece’s relations with the US, nor the alignment of the two countries on the issue of the negotiations about the economy’. Concrete support from Washington was not forthcoming, however, and criticism of the prison reform bill continued unabated until the very end of the Syriza-led government’s tenure in office, initially with regard to Xiros’ impending discharge (which he ended up rejecting himself on ideological grounds relating to the supervisory conditions he would have had to satisfy) and then with reference to what was described, typically in dramatic terms, as a rise in common crime stemming from the expanded use of parole for hardcore criminals. Initial appearances to the contrary, however, it is questionable whether the bill delivered much by way of its intended decarcerative effects. The caseload of convicted prisoners released on parole increased by 13.6 percent between 2014 and 2015, from 4510 to 5123. Indeed, both the absolute number of convicted prisoners who were released on parole in 2015 and the proportion they constituted of the total caseload of convicted prisoners that year (at 34.6 percent) were the highest to have been recorded in Greece during the long