Greece

The introduction of conditional release in Greece dates back nearly a hundred years. ¹ As one might expect, the pertinent laws have been subjected to a number of reforms ever since. What is less expectable, perhaps, is that none of those reforms has brought about any fundamentally progressive large-scale change to the ways in which conditional release is applied on the ground. Indeed, amid pompous rhetoric of the rehabilitative and humanitarianist varieties, conditional release in Greece has always been hostage to conservative control imperatives. This may be understood in two seemingly contradictory but eventually complementary senses. On the one hand, conditional release has been deployed as a no-cost tool for curbing overcrowding in the antiquated prisons of the country and a ‘carrot-and-stick’ mechanism of incentivizing orderly behaviour among prisoners. ² Both are functions which Rothman (1980/2002) characterizes under the catch-all term ‘administrative convenience’. On the other hand, owing to political considerations of the elites in office and the centralization of decision-making powers in the hands of a traditionally punitive judiciary, harsh legal and practical restrictions have been placed upon the granting of conditional release. This has not simply crippled the 214capacity of the scheme to bring down overcrowding. The attendant frustration among prisoners over the degrading conditions of captivity combines with resentment for the lack of promised rewards in exchange for compliant conduct, to erode the effectiveness of conditional release as a means of pre-empting prison unrest. But again, as Cohen (1985) notes well, disorders caused by penality itself operate subtly to legitimate the ongoing and continuing neglect of decarcerative alternatives. Never has this paradox been more pronounced in Greece than today.