Cheliotis and Xenakis 93 Conclusion Our review of the relationship between the ideological orientation of government, economic downturn and incarceration in Greece has revealed a complex picture. To start with ideological orientation, although Syriza’s entry into office as the senior partner of a coalition in January 2015 marked a leftward shift in government following decades of centrist rule, the ways in which incarceration evolved in the country over the next four-and-a-half years were more often than not continuous with the excessively harsh trends of the preceding era. Turning to economic conditions, we similarly find that, although a tipping point in economic downturn and related societal hardship allowed the rise to power of a leftist anti-austerity party that was openly promising to foreground human rights and promote progressive change in matters of incarceration as well, economic pressures triggered arrangements that acted retrogressively to restrict the government’s scope to enact its agenda on the carceral front, as most starkly illustrated by the impact of severe externally imposed restraints on public expenditure. To this extent, our analysis challenges pertinent international literature in certain respects while supporting it in others. In particular, although our findings problematise the view that harsh and worsening socio-economic conditions facilitate the ascent of political parties with a stronger commitment to public spending retrenchment or that they enable the mobilisation of cross-party support in this direction, it is confirmed that the political orientation of sitting parties cannot be relied upon to predict the evolution of carceral policies and practices, and that the role of government political orientation in this regard may be overridden by economic pressures. Equally, however, the case of Greece is one where fiscal constraints did not bring about a sustained reduction in the use of incarceration, although they did contribute to the further deterioration of carceral conditions. Our analysis nevertheless also suggests a qualification to the emerging notion that economic decline outweighs the political orientation of incumbent governments to generate adverse carceral effects. If, rather than considering the reality and fiscal repercussions of Greece’s economic decline solely at their most acute (that is, when Syriza was in office), one examines more broadly the years since the country went into recession, was plunged into a debt crisis and soon thereafter started receiving fiscally restrictive bailout loans from the Troika, then the carceral continuities one can observe between Syriza’s coalition government and its centrist predecessors during this period appear to further corroborate that economic downturn trumps political orientation as a determining factor in carceral policies and practices. For example, on successive occasions before Syriza rose to power, prison budgets had already been slashed and prisoner-focused expenditure overshadowed under the Troika’s tutelage (GSAP, 2017). If, however, one takes a longer-term perspective, then one discovers that the continuities at least in levels and patterns of imprisonment (for example, swelling prison populations and rising human rights violations inside prisons) stretch back to an economically stable period when centrist parties alternated in office. What this implies is that any pernicious influence subsequently exerted on incarceration by economic downturn and its fiscal repercussions was not axiomatically unrelated to the political orientation of the governments that ruled the country before Syriza’s coalition, nor, at any rate, did it necessarily clash with the overall plan they had meant to pursue on the fronts of imprisonment and immigration detention. Well before the Troika’s