The people of Greece are still experiencing the deepest and most rapid decline in social conditions of anywhere in Europe, with all its attendant miseries. The average salary in that unfortunate country has shrunk to a miserly £17,000 per annum. That is of course if you are working, and that is certainly no guarantee, with unemployment running at 25.9% and youth unemployment at 49.3%. With this economic disaster heaped on the people of Greece, under the dictate of the Troika, (EC, European Commission, ECB, European Central Bank, IMF, International Mankind Fuckers), unrest and crime grows rapidly. In parallel with this, state repression increases and so the prison population grows, and in Greece it grows at a staggering rate.
The Greek prison system is by far, the worst in Europe, and could compare unfavourably with some Third World countries. Overcrowding is away beyond anything acceptable in any civilised country, and is not going to be resolved any time soon.
With many prisons already at double or triple capacity, hundreds are
stuck in police holding cells, many in pre-trial detention, which has an
18-month limit under Greek law. These detainees have no yard access and
are kept locked up for months as their cases wind at a snail's pace
through the overburdened justice system.
The Council of Europe's latest annual penal statistics, published in
May and covering 2011, show Greek prisons were at 151.7 percent capacity
on September 1 that year, with 12,479 inmates crammed into 8,224
available places. The number of inmates has increased steadily. In
January 2010, Greek prisons held 11,364 inmates, according to the
Justice Ministry's website. On Nov. 1, they reached 13,147, according to
Greek prison system figures obtained by the AP. That doesn't include
those, like Aslanis, held in police stations.
Recent Greek prison system documents from late 2013 list a higher
capacity number of 9,886 places across the country, but the number is
deceptive as it includes at least five prison wings in two prisons that
remain shut due to budget cuts.-------
Bad as the prisons are,
the prison hospitals move into a category of their own, somewhere close to the seventh circle of hell in
Dante's Inferno.
The
Korydallos prison hospital west of Athens is designed to hold 60 men
but currently houses more than 200, rights groups and prison staff said
Monday. Most are HIV positive and many others suffer from communicable
diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and scabies.
Protesters
posted statements on Facebook and Twitter saying at least 178 of the
inmates have been refusing prison food for the past week, while some HIV
positive inmates are refusing to take antiretroviral drugs to draw
attention to their plight.-------
It is in the face of this barbarity that we have seen a wave of hunger strikes in Greek prisons. On one recent occasion it was a hunger strike that stretched across the entire Greek prison system. Today their are still individuals on hunger strike, attempting to draw attention to the injustices that they suffer.
This is the price that the people of Greece are paying as the Troika carries out its experiment to turn Europe into a Western sweatshop, to compete with its rival, the Eastern sweatshop bloc. Greece is capitalism with the gloves off, it is the true face of capitalism.
A doctor who examined the comrade at Koridallos prison on Thursday morning, November 13th – during the fourth day of hunger strike
– reports that 21-year-old Nikos Romanos has lost 3.2 kg of body weight
and feels intense weakness and fatigue even after very mild exertion,
such as walking from the cell to the prison infirmary. His blood glucose
level (measured by finger stick) was 64.
Between the 13th and the 14th of November, 75 prisoners in the Ε wing of Koridallos men’s prison abstained from meals in solidarity with their fellow inmate Romanos.
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