Cheliotis and Xenakis 77 Democracy increasingly converged towards the centre while alternating in office; the shorter stretch between the late 2000s and the mid-2010s, when the emergence of economic downturn in the country saw further continuity in government political orientation, with PASOK and New Democracy even joining forces in the context of a coalition; and the four-and-a-half-year spell thereafter, when sustained and deepening economic downturn was coeval with a decisive leftward shift in the political orientation of government on account of Syriza’s entry into office as the senior partner of a coalition. The scope of our study, in other words, allows for the identification of a triad of combinations of different economic conditions and varying government political orientations. In principle, these can then be compared with one another according to their respective carceral trends so as to sharpen our understanding of the nature and degree of influence that the interaction between the experience of economic downturn and the general ideological outlook of sitting parties has had on Greek carceral policy and practice. Although we do not have space in this article to offer systematic historical comparisons in this vein, we outline key pertinent observations in our conclusion. Our primary aim is rather to gauge the carceral effects of Syriza’s arrival in government, particularly how and the extent to which its plans for progressive reforms were affected by ongoing and intensifying economic downturn and its fiscal repercussions. To this end, we also identify the direction and amount of influence exerted by an array of other forces in this regard, albeit not invariably across both conventional imprisonment and immigration detention. Political orientation of government, economic downturn, and state punishment Research has thus far identified no clear relationship between the ideological leanings of the incumbent party and state use of punishment. In the US, for example, the upward trajectory of imprisonment from the 1970s onwards has been shown to have been unrelated to whether state or national government was led by Republicans or by Democrats (Caplow and Simon, 1999; Gottschalk, 2016; Grumbach, 2018; compare Brown, 2013). Pointing in the same general direction are the findings from Karstedt et al.’s (2019) analysis of decarcerative legal reforms since the late 2000s across all 50 US states, which demonstrates that the introduction of such reforms has not been confined to Democratcontrolled state governments, even though it has been comparatively more likely under them. Likewise, the overall ‘punitive drift’ in penal policy in the UK since the early 1990s has been found to have been promoted by both the Conservatives and the Labour Party (Downes, 2001; Newburn, 2007; Reiner, 2007; Tonry, 2004). Owing at least in part to such continuities having been revealed, relevant scholarship has sought to identify broader ideological orientations that have traversed rather than divided political parties in office, fuelling an intensification of state punishment as they have done so. A simultaneous commitment to neoliberal economics and neo-conservative morality has received especial attention in this respect, with the majority of commentators arguing that allegiance to neoliberalism on the economic front has presaged and even necessitated the enactment of neo-conservative principles in terms of penal policy and practice (see, for example, Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Wacquant, 2009; compare Farrall and Jennings, 2014). There is, however, some research to suggest that