94 European Journal of Criminology 18(1) intervention began, for example, per-prisoner expenditure was already systematically kept at profoundly inadequate levels, thereby in effect perpetuating terrible prison conditions. One could argue, therefore, that government political orientation may actually be causally superior to economic downturn so long as there is equivalence between the two in terms of the carceral impact they would have independently of one another. In the absence of such equivalence, of course, economic downturn is indisputably more important in determining carceral outcomes. Even so, it would be a manifest error to assume that economic downturn interacts with government political orientation alone. Further powerful forces may be at play, either constraining or, indeed, exacerbating the effects of economic downturn on carceral policy and practice. In the case of the Syriza-led government, we find that additional regressive factors combined with economic conditions to further restrict the Syriza-led government’s ability to realise its aspirations for reforms either to conventional imprisonment or to migrant detention. But whilst such factors manifested themselves on each of the policy fronts at issue, we conclude that they were not equally consequential, which also explains why the government was particularly unsuccessful in enforcing its agenda for migrant detention. In particular, the obstructive impact that judicial culture – or, rather, judicial political orientation – had on the government’s plans for prison reform was neither as insurmountable nor, indeed, as comprehensive as the obstacles that pressure from the EU and changing international migration patterns posed for the change the government hoped to bring to the country’s immigration detention system. This should not be read as implying that forces beyond the Troika that stemmed from the international sphere invariably stood in the way of government plans, nor, in any case, that they were always irresistible per se. True as it may be, as our analysis also shows, that the US actively tried to thwart the Greek government’s endeavour to liberalise parole provisions in a way that was meant to reduce the use of custodial punishment and relieve prison overcrowding and associated problems, it is equally evident that the CPT and the ECtHR were very much in step with the government in their constant push for compliance with the ECHR across Greece’s carceral sites. As we proceed to demonstrate, however, both of these efforts were frustrated, in stark contrast to the EU’s intervention effectively in favour of severity – indeed, infringement of the European human rights regime – in Greek immigration detention matters. This confirms two key conclusions from our previous research on the forces that have shaped the carceral policies and practices enacted in Greece over time: first, that just as international pressures may assume different and even contradictory forms, so too they may vary according to their respective causal import; and second, that the actual impact of external actors has predominantly been a negative one (see, further, Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2018). To recap and elaborate, as far as conventional imprisonment is concerned, the Syrizaled government not only ushered in a major change in state rhetoric around crime and punishment, it was also successful in abolishing maximum-security prisons, made a start in terms of promoting sorely needed drug rehabilitation programmes for prisoners, and, at least for a short while, managed to reduce overall prisoner numbers. In so doing, moreover, the government was able to resist select foreign pressure from the US not to liberalise the country’s parole system while at the same time taking steps towards