Authors: Janine Louloudi, Nikos Morfonios, Kostas Zafeiropoulos (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualizations:  Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

“Every time it happens, you relive it. It’s terrible. I always think, ‘Oh that mother, that father, what they have to go through’.” For Katerina Koti, the mother of 31-year-old Dora Zacharia, who was murdered in Rhodes in September 2021 by her ex-boyfriend a few days after their breakup, each new femicide announcement is another small tragedy. Dora was the 11th victim that year, in a list that was destined to grow considerably…

In the middle of last summer, three women lost their lives in less than 48 hours in different corners of Greece at the hands of their partners. On July 31, 2022, a man stabbed his wife to death in Rethymno when she asked him for a divorce. The next day in Zakynthos, another man savagely beat his wife and then killed her with a knife. A few hours before her murder, the woman had gone to the local police station to file another complaint against him, after he had beaten her again. Just hours later, a 17-year-old girl in Peristeri would become the youngest female murder victim.

This kind of “epidemic” of murders of women by their current or former partners is the culmination of a trend that has long plagued Greece and seems to have intensified during the recent pandemic. And not just Greece: in Spain there were four murders of women in different cities in one day at the beginning of the year. Similar grim reports are arriving from other European countries, fuelling the debate on whether femicide should be recognised as a crime in its own right. So far only two European states, Cyprus and Malta, have ventured to take this step.

But what is happening in reality? Has there been an increase in the number of women murdered in recent years by male partners or family members? Is this development consistent with a wider increase in gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence, during the pandemic period? Has there really been an increase in femicide rates in Europe? And which countries are having the most difficulty in curbing violence against women?

The MIIR – EDJNet cross-border data investigation

The answers to these questions are not easy to find, as no official data has been published at a European Union level for the period after 2018. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), which is in charge of conducting research and monitoring policies on violence against women, launched a survey in 2020, but the results are not expected to be published before 2024. This means that the EU will not have a full picture of what has been happening in a crucial area affecting half of its population for a period of around five years!

MIIR, together with a total of 18 European media outlets, including Deutsche Welle, El Confidencial, Civio, OBCT and others, within the framework of EDJNet, attempted to generate the most up to date map of violence against women in Europe today. By requesting statistical figures from the competent national authorities for the years 2010-2021, MIIR created a new database which contains important findings for the direction of gender-based violence in European countries. With the contribution of iMEdD Lab the data was analyzed, focusing on the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The research was based on two primary data sources. The first of these are the EIGE indicators for recording intimate partner violence against women and femicide by male perpetrators, as included in the 2021 Gender Equality Report, which includes data up to 2018. EIGE defines “intimate partner violence” as any act of physical, sexual, psychological or economic violence that occurs between former or current spouses or partners, regardless of whether they live in the same house. The teams participating in the investigation sought and contributed as up-to-date data as possible, which was audited based on EIGE guidelines. 

Regarding “Femicide”, it is worth mentioning that EIGE adopts the statistical definition of “the killing of a woman by an intimate partner and the death of a woman as a result of a practice that is harmful to women”, and places crimes pertaining to these characteristics to “Indicator 9” which measures the deaths of female femicide victims aged 18 and older. In Greece there is no specific law for the criminal prosecution of the act of femicide, and so the phenomenon is monitored in the country through the collection of data regarding the female victims of intentional homicide, while the relationship with the perpetrator is generated in combination with the law for the handling of domestic violence.

As a second source and tool for informal “verification” of the results, Eurostat databases were used, providing data for the crimes of intentional homicides, rapes and sexual assaults, where the perpetrator is a partner or family member, up until 2020, as well as some details on the criminal sanctions against perpetrators. In the case of Greece, data was collected from the General Secretariat for Gender Equality, which in turn collected data from the Hellenic Police and the ministry of Justice. Along with Slovenia, Greece was one of the countries that contributed data in most categories. But the hidden picture behind these is quite dark. 

The data black hole on gender-based violence in the EU

Following the contribution of new data, on the basis of the first data source, the total number of femicides from 2010 to 2021 in the 20 countries providing data is estimated at 3232 – although no data is available for eight countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, Ireland, Romania). However, the above figure is a sign of serious indications of underreporting by the police authorities. This is because, at the same time, Eurostat data shows 6593 intentional homicides of women in Europe between 2011-2021, including 4208 by partners and 2385 by relatives (the figures for 20 countries: Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden).

Both for our research and for policymaking, the lack of up-to-date data is a major limitation. The EDJNet teams collectively discovered significant gaps in the publishing of recent data by state actors. Adding to this is the lack of data with similar, and thus comparable characteristics. “No score is given to the EU in the domain of violence, due to a lack of comparable EU-wide data,” claims EIGE, which is looking for ways to overcome this obstacle. Despite these hurdles, the data now included in MIIR’s primary database yields important findings on the recent direction of gender-based violence in Europe and Greece. 

Explosion of femicides in Greece

For more reliable results, due to both incomplete data and different methods of recording femicides based on the EIGE index from country to country, a choice was made to compare not absolute numbers but rather the percentage change in femicides between years, for those countries with available data. In addition, the data was extrapolated to comparable rates per 100,000 population.

Greece had the highest increase in femicides in 2021 with an increase of 187.5%, from 8 incidents in 2020 to 23 in 2021. Sweden also took a “leap” with a 120% increase in femicides in 2018 compared to 2017, while Estonia and Slovenia saw a 100% increase in 2015 and 2020 respectively. Comparing the two-year pandemic with 2019 shows that Greece, Slovenia, Germany and Italy saw a significant increase in femicides.

For the purposes of the investigation the participating teams also collected data from unofficial sources, such as local monitoring groups for the recording of femicides. Such organizations mostly monitor media coverage with the aim of countering the underreporting of violence against women. This choice was made in order to compare the official number of femicides with the unofficial one.

‘We are not claiming that we are keeping an accurate count of femicides, but we are trying to demonstrate the necessity of open data. The issue of violence during the pandemic is very complex and not temporary. Based on the data we have from 2019 to 2022 we observe a persistence of the phenomenon,” says Athena Pegglidou, who founded the Greek section of the European Observatory on Femicide. For 2020 and 2021,the unofficial number of recorded femicides collected by the Observatory was higher in Greece than the official state number, by 2.4 times in 2020 and 1.4 times in 2021 respectively. In Serbia, the unofficial number of femicides collected by the NGO Autonomous Women’s Centre was almost 1.5 times higher than the official number. 

Examining Eurostat data on intentional homicides of women by men, partners or relatives, a similar increase of 156% in 2021 compared to 2020 is confirmed for Greece. The analysis further shows that Slovenia had a 100% increase in the first year of the pandemic in homicides of women by intimate partners and relatives compared to 2019. Croatia, Austria and Hungary followed with increases of 55.6%, 28.6% and 26.1% respectively.

Cristina Fabre Rosell works as Gender-based Violence Team Leader at the European Institute for Gender Equality, and explains that during the first lockdown of the pandemic there was a relative decrease in the number of femicide incidents, but the risk lingered: 

“Women were not at risk of femicide during the pandemic because they were stuck with the perpetrator, and therefore the perpetrator felt more confident. All the power and control was in his hands. She had nowhere to go, so she had no exit. So the intimate partner violence increased, but not the more severe form that is worse, femicide. What was more worrying for us were the measures that were to be established after the lockdown. How were we going to protect all these women that were running away from their perpetrators. And so our fear was that the severe form of intimate partner violence that is intimate femicide could increase after the release of the lockdown measures. This has happened in some member states. But we are still not able to see if this is a common pattern that happened across all EU member states, and to what extent we can say that it’s a result of these measures. We don’t have evidence. But we hope that with the collection of data on intimate partner femicide across the years, perhaps we will be able to build the evidence”.

As the figures from this data-driven investigation show, this was the case in 2021 in several countries, most notably Greece.

Increase in violence against women

The words of EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader are confirmed by the analysis of other EIGE indicators on physical, psychological, economic and sexual violence. The figures in the following graph show the variation in the number of victims of each type of violence in recent years.

In Greece, the pandemic period was marked by a frightening 110.2% increase in victims of physical violence in 2020 and 90.4% in 2021. Specifically, in 2020, 3609 victims of physical violence were recorded, while in 2021 the number reached 6873. Meanwhile, the number of victims of sexual violence increased from 69 to 141. 

In parallel, the widened use of the internet and the increase in online abuse, led to an 84.1% rise in victims of psychological violence in the country, reaching the number of 2906 victims in 2020, only to register another rise by 104.6% and reach 5350 victims in 2021. “I do think that we are now kind of conceptualizing psychological violence and people are more aware of what psychological violence is, and the huge impact that psychological violence has. I do think that this is probably the trend that we are seeing, more victims are aware of ‘this is unacceptable, this is an offense, this is violence’, EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader explains.  

According to EIGE, at least 44% of women in Europe have been subjected to psychological violence at some point by a partner. However, there do seem to be countries that have managed to slow its spread, such as Serbia and Germany, where the increase was limited to 3.4% and 1.5% respectively in the first year of the pandemic.

There are but a few reports about enforcing economic violence against women (this is the suffocating financial control or financial bleeding that a man may exert towards his current or former partner). Of the ten countries reporting it, six saw an increase and four a decrease from 2015 to 2018. Finland had the highest average increase at 33.4%, followed by the Czech Republic at 26.6%, Germany at 12.2%, Austria at 8.4%, Spain at 6.0% and Latvia at 4.6%. On the other hand, Belgium recorded an average decrease of -0.1%, Malta a decrease of -2.7%, Slovakia a decrease of -12.1% and Serbia a decrease of -18.1%.

In regard with the sexual violence indicator, Greece, Serbia and Slovenia showed significant increases in the years of the pandemic. In particular, sexual violence in Greece increased by 115.6% in 2020 and 104.3% in 2021. In Serbia it increased by 76.0% in 2021, after a decrease of -52.6% in 2020, while in Slovenia it increased by 64.3% in 2020 and 17.4% in 2021. Germany showed an increase of 8.0% in 2020, while Hungary also noted an increase of 20.8% in 2020, but posted a shift of -6.3% in 2021.

Based on Eurostat data, Hungary and Greece recorded the largest increases in reported rapes of women in 2020, with 41.2% and 36.5%, respectively, followed by Romania and Slovenia. Overall, Sweden leads the way with 135 victims of rape and 197 victims of sexual assault per 100,000 female population between 2015 and 2020 (note that in Sweden the definition of rape was widened in 2013, and again in 2018 and this could be affecting figures). Denmark, France and Finland follow with 54, 47 and 41 victims of rape per 100,000 female population, respectively. In terms of sexual assaults, France, Denmark, Germany and Finland have the highest rates.

The negligence of law enforcement authorities that costs lives

Konstantina Tsapa was murdered on April 5, 2021 with a knife by her estranged husband in the village of Makrinitsa, in Pelion near Volos. On that day, inside her parents’ house, the perpetrator also murdered her brother Giorgo Tsapas. Four days earlier the killer had again violently attacked the mother of his child and her parents in the same house. Similar violent incidents had been repeated several times by the same perpetrator, but despite appeals to the police, lawsuits and a request for an injunction, the perpetrator had not spent a single night in custody.

“In the quarrel in Makrinitsa before the murder, he had come to the house and beat all three of us – me, my wife and my late daughter. Then the police took him away, to the police station, kept him there for two-three hours. But they let him go, and they told me, ‘we cannot hold him anymore’,” a devastated Apostolos Chapas told MIIR. He had seen his two children murdered before his eyes.

“The police forces had a tolerant attitude towards the perpetrator,” says Anthoula Anasoglou, an advocate for the victims’ family. “He had also been charged with domestic violence in 2021. But he was never arrested. In fact, during the trial, a police witness admitted that the police had released him a few days earlier, saying ‘Okay, they are a couple, they will get back together’.”

Dora Zacharia was unaware in 2021 that her then partner and later murderer had previously been prosecuted for illegal violence and carrying a weapon after an incident in which he had threatened his former partner. The misdemeanor offense of unlawful violence had been dropped due to the expiry of the offense, while he had received a two-month prison sentence with a three-year suspension for the offense of unlawful carrying of weapons. Another former partner, a victim of physical violence, had also filed a complaint against him, but the injunction was not heard in time.

Dora Zacharia was the 11th victim of femicide for 2021. She was murdered in Rhodes by her former partner a few days after their separation.

“Dora paid for this delay with her life. We lost our child unjustly,” commented Katerina Koti, mother of the 31-year-old teacher who was murdered in 2021, to MIIR.

The available data collected in Greece for 2020 shows that of the 4436 perpetrators of domestic violence against women, 70.6% (3132) were prosecuted. Of these, 20.9% were convicted, but only 13.7% of those convicted went to prison. However, comparing the number of offenders with the number of men imprisoned, it is estimated that for every 100 offenders recorded in 2020 only 2 – a 2% percentage – were recorded as ending up in prison.

It is worth noting that the absolute figures may not fully reflect the situation in the reference year and that there may be anomalies in the data. For example, the registration of an offender in 2020 does not mean that the offense was committed in 2020, and similarly the imprisonment of an offender in 2020 does not mean that he committed the offense in the same year. For this reason, these rates are a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment of perpetrators of crimes of violence against women, recorded in a given time period, and should be interpreted as an indicator of a trend.

On average, annually, only 3% of men prosecuted for domestic violence in Greece and 5% in Slovenia ended up in prison. In contrast, in Spain, the average annual percentage of men prosecuted for domestic violence who ended up in prison was 30%, respectively.

Dora Zacharias’ mother is now a frequent participant in anti-femicide events, along with the mothers of other murdered women. Together they are urgently calling for changes in the way the state and society as a whole deal with violence against women and perpetrators of domestic violence.

In a historic decision on 22 February, after 6 years of delays due to constant opposition from various member states, the European Council decided that the EU should accede to the Istanbul Convention as a transnational entity. This follows the agreement of the European Parliament, which had previously called for violence against women to be included in the list of recognised crimes in the EU. In force since 2014 – and ratified in Greece since 2018 – the convention is the first legally binding international text that sets criteria for the prevention of gender-based violence in the EU, and could serve as a guide for follow-up initiatives by Brussels.

However, on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the European Commission had asked the European Parliament to adopt as soon as possible a proposed directive submitted last March to combat violence against women and domestic violence. Among other things, the directive aims to enshrine in EU legislation minimum standards for criminalising certain forms of violence against women; protecting victims and improving access to justice; supporting victims and ensuring coordination between relevant services; and work on prevention.

The directive also proposes that data collection should finally be made compulsory throughout the EU. The extent of violence against women is underreported and under-communicated, and, as noted, the data is not easily comparable between EU countries. In fact, the directive mentions that the last relevant pan-European survey was published in 2014.

The results of the cross-border data investigation carried out by MIIR and EDJNet add substance to the aforementioned. It took a total of 19 European teams of journalists and four months of searching for up-to-date data from the relevant national authorities of at least 22 countries, in order to show whether there was an increase in femicides and violence against women during the pandemic. Some teams succeeded in obtaining new and comparable data, others did not. 

It is clear in any case that without a common European system for the recording of violence against women and the strengthening of the victims protection system,  enforcement of the law and re-examining penalties for perpetrators, and systematically educating young people about gender identity and sexual relations, gender-based violence will continue to flourish. It is always a possibility of course that no one will find out about it, because incidents will simply not be recorded…

Research – Text: Nikos Morfonios, Ioanna Louloudi (MIIR)  

Reseach and data visualisation: Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)*

“When I got COVID in December 2020, around half of the prisoners in the Larissa Prison were sick at the same time.  We were put into a ward with 60 people, in a space of around 110 square meters. It was a roll of the dice whether you were going to be severely or just mildly ill.” The testimony of Vangelis Stathopoulos, a prisoner of the Larissa Prison, vividly summarizes the situation of Covid-19 in Greek prisons. It is confirmed by the findings of a large analysis of data from 32 countries, conducted by 12 European media outlets led by Deutsche Welle within the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet). 

The MIIR (Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting) and iMΕdD (Incubator for Media Education and Development) collected and processed the specific data concerning Greek prisons. This concerned their capacity, overcrowding, covid cases, deaths, access to healthcare and vaccination. In parallel, interviews were conducted with prisoners, specialists and scientists. Other institutional factors were also taken into account in the context of this pan-European research. What were the conclusions about Greek prisons? 

The virus spread twice as fast in prisons compared to the rest of society. As a result, one third of prisoners have been sick  to date. Explanations include cells with prisoners crowded into a few square meters; makeshift wards without any separation of patients; crowded quarantine areas filled with both healthy people and suspected cases; and insufficient access to healthcare and safety measures. Moreover, prisoners’ rights have been curtailed with the cancellation of visits and activities. 

For the data on covid cases, deaths and vaccinations until February 2022, the sources are the General Secretariat for Crime Policy, Greece’s “Special Standing Committee on the Penitentiary System and Other Structures concerning the Detention of Prisoners”, and the “Report on the Coronavirus by the General Secretariat of Anti-Crime Policy” submitted to the Greek Parliament on 12 November 2020 by the Deputy Minister of Civil Protection, Lefteris Oikonomou.

In Greece, the overcrowded prisons have created a favorable ground for the reproduction and spread of the coronavirus. It is not just the fact that based on the comparative data of the research, Greece appears in 7th place (as of January 2020) in the list of the most crowded prisons in Europe – this refers to the official number of prisoners each prison can hold and the actual population living within the walls. It is mainly the investigation’s finding in relation to the minimum living space of each detainee based on international conventions – in 25 of the 34 Greek prisons, this requirement is disrespected, making prisoners even more exposed to the virus.

For the same reason, our comparative analysis of the data reveals a shocking reality: Greece is one of the European countries that had the highest spread of the virus in prisons compared to the spread in the general population. By 2 July 2021, 16 months after the start of the pandemic, it is estimated that 7.9% of the prisoners in total were infected with the virus. The figure for the general population was 4.1%. Transmission inside prisons was almost twice as high as outside the prisons. The situation was similar in Northern Ireland, Italy, England and Wales, Slovenia, Belgium and Catalonia. In contrast, there was a smaller spread of the disease within prisons (compared to the general population) in Hungary, Austria, Spain (excluding Catalonia), Ireland, Switzerland, Albania, Germany and Scotland. 

Regarding the number of cases, Ioannina and Patras reported more than 300 cases per 1,000 inmates in prisons (392 and 339 respectively) between 1 March and 1 July 2021. They were followed by Larissa (278) and the special health center for prisoners at Korydallos (272) – though it is estimated that cases that have been reported there had been transferred from other wards or from other prisons. In the first three prisons it is estimated that the occupancy rate during the pandemic was kept constantly above 100%. In Ioannina the number of inmates was almost double the actual available capacity. In Patras the proportion reached 137% and in Larissa 129%.   

We collected new data in November 2021, finding again that the transmission in Greek prisons was more than double compared to the rest of society (16.8% vs. 7.2%). By February 2022, a period covered by the 4th wave of the pandemic and the outbreak of Omicron, 32.6% of prisoners had been diagnosed with coronavirus compared with 21.2% of the general population. In absolute numbers, the data in the Greek penitentiary establishments from the beginning of the pandemic until February 2022 reported 3,541 cases and 14 deaths. Disease management within prisons has been improvised and fragmented in response to the pandemic, and this has been added to the traditional structural problems of Greek penitentiaries.

Korydallos prison – Credit: Prisoners’ Solidarity Network

Less than 4 square meters of personal space in 25 of the 34 prisons

The minimal space of 4 square meters is important, not only in times of pandemic. Everyone, even in prison, has a right to a minimum of privacy.

“In Larissa prisons, the cells are for 8 and 10 people, so if someone gets sick, it makes sense that in a very small space of 15 square meters everyone will probably get sick,” says Stathopoulos, describing the suffocating situation in the cells.

According to the data, until 1 July 2021 in 25 of the 34 prisons of the country, each prisoner disposed of 4 square meters. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) of the Council of Europe has defined this space as the minimum per detainee in his cell. More specifically, in the special detention center for young people in Volos, each detainee had approximately 1.9 square meters of personal space. In Tripoli it was 2.1, in Kos and Komotini 2.3, in Ioannina 2.4, and in Chalkida and Nafplio 2.7 square meters.

“Every prisoner, according to the European Committee’s proposal for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), should have at least four square meters of living space in his chamber and six square meters in his cell”, explains Giannis Petsas, who holds a PhD in penitentiary policy. According to the CPT’s protocol, each cell should be at least 6 square meters if it accommodates one detainee, while for each additional detainee the area of ​​the cell should be expanded by 4 square meters. “This area is important”, points out Mr Petsas: “Not only for periods of pandemic. It is already very small and does not protect against the spread of the virus. But also in general, because every person even inside a prison must have a minimum of privacy so that he can live as best as he can. When you do not have this space and you are visible to others at all times, then basic human rights are violated.”

The reality is that the living space of each inmate in a prison is even less than the result of our data analysis. This used the median number of inmates per month in relation to the total area of ​​each prison. The exact number of cells is not known even by the General Secretariat for Anti-Crime Policy. When we asked exactly how many cells there are in the country’s prisons, what their size is and how many prisoners live in them, the GAP’s answer was that “we take the total space per detention center and divide it by 16 sq m. which should be each cell (4 prisoners), since each prisoner should have 4 square meters (based on CPT specifications). We would like to inform you that in the SPACEI questionnaire (this is the annual report with statistics on prisons of the Council of Europe) on 31 January 2020, Greece reported – as a total number of cells (in the country) – 2,747. We commented that the number of cells was calculated based on the minimum standards of the CPT for the space per inmate 4 square meters”. In other words, the 2,747 cells do not correspond to real data, but to the ideal and imaginary scenario that every prisoner should have a living space of 4 square meters.

Larisa prison. Credit: Prisoners Solidarity Network

Overcrowding makes prisons health hazards

In the comparative data from 32 countries collected during the research, Greece appears in 7th place overall for overcrowded  conditions in Europe. Based on the more specific data on the occupancy rate in Greek prisons, it appears that the average occupancy rate – based on the comparative analysis of the actual prison population and space in each institution, during the period from 1/1/2020 to 1/1/2022 – far exceeds 100% in 25 of the 34 institutions.

“There are several countries where there are more people in prisons than there should be,” said Filipa Alves da Costa, a public health expert at the World Health Organization’s Prison Health Program. “So there is the issue of overcrowding, and even in areas where there is no overcrowding, the occupancy is always close to 100%. This means that prisoners cannot follow the rules of physical distancing, for example. Therefore there is a greater risk when the virus is introduced into the prison environment, precisely because it is a closed living structure and it is not possible to comply with the conditions of distancing. In other words, it is a reinforcing factor of the effects of the virus compared to what we encounter in the rest of society”, she notes. 

In the case of Greece it seems from the data analysis that during the pandemic the occupancy of Greek prisons not only did not decrease, but on the contrary increased! Specifically, while on 1 January 2020 (before the pandemic) the occupancy was 107%, from April 2020 to May 2021 it increased to 113.1% (July 2021). 

In fact, according to the data, on 1/1/2022 in the special prison for young people in Volos, the occupancy reaches 201.9%. In Komotini it was 188.3%, in Tripoli 181.1%, in Corfu 173.9%, in Ioannina 154.5%, followed by the prisons of Chalkida (154.3%), Patras (148.9%), Nafplio (147.6%) and Kos (144.6%).

But there is another variable that makes prisoners vulnerable to the coronavirus. “Many detainees have many factors that put them at increased risk for a serious Covid-19 case, including conditions such as HIV and a history of smoking or other drugs. Marginalization, poverty and inadequate access to health care often burden these populations even before imprisonment, and prison conditions often exacerbate these factors,” according to the WHO. “In prison we consider people in their 50s to be older, even though they would not be if they were part of a community,” said Da Costa.

The WHO special advisor’s description corresponds to the case of Greek prisons. Poor living conditions, inadequate access to healthcare, a lack of support for medical staff and a lack of effective healthcare measures by prison administrations and the General Secretariat for Crime Policy – all exacerbate the transmission problem.

Chalkida prison. Credit: Prisoners’ Solidarity Network

Inmates play doctor

Vassilis Dimakis is an inmate in the 4th ward of Korydallos prison. As he describes it, at the beginning of the pandemic “the only measures were some bleach, and after a few months some masks. Antiseptics and masks did not exist in the beginning, they rarely brought us any, specifically they brought us masks after the first half of the year when some people from the outside brought them to us “.

Regarding the adequacy of medical and nursing staff throughout the pandemic, Dimakis states that “it is not specialized. The same people that were here before the pandemic continued to be here after the pandemic began. The staff was not upgraded. The prisoners had to do the dirty work themselves. For example for their working day, they had to work in the pharmacy. There is also no permanent doctor here, he only comes in in the morning. In the afternoon there are some nurses who have been placed by the administration to give injections. There is no doctor at night. 2,000 people are here and we are not being taken care of. “If something happens, there are the so-called trauma specialists who deal with someone who has a problem,  and take him to the hospital”, he notes.

The same image is confirmed by Stathopoulos. Like in the Korydallos prison, in the Larissa prison “the staff is not specialized. There are some nurses, who are few in number, only 8. There were no doctors! There was a prisoner who was a doctor and was inside for a financial offence. He had undertaken to check up on the prisoners who had fallen ill. As a result, as was logical because he came in contact with everyone, he got sick and also more seriously than everyone else. He was transported to hospital with a heavy case of Covid-19 and was admitted to the intensive care ward”.

“They place all the sick together and what will be will be…” 

However, the inadequacy of prevention and treatment of Covid-19 is not limited to the lack of health personnel and protective equipment. The whole case management and care of the sick seems more like a system based on sloppiness and randomness.

“Whoever who gets sick with Covid”, describes Stathopoulos, “is transferred to other special wards, which have other patients from different wards. They set up some special rooms, which used to be prison cells, and simply squeeze these prisoners into other wards. So whoever gets sick is locked up in a ward for 14 days with all the other Covid patients, which means that if someone has a serious case it can automatically be transferred to everyone else and everyone can get very sick. So the method is that we put all the patients together and what will be will be”. 

Dimakis describes the same treatment in Korydallos. “The patients are in spaces that are not disinfected, without any care for 14 days. “People come in all together, with a heavy viral load, and they all wake up together.” Regarding the hospital area, Dimakis points out that “unfortunately, the third ward of the Korydallos women’s prison, promised by Ms Nikolaou (former Secretary General of Anti-Crime Policy), has not opened, and has not hosted a single person ever! It was – supposedly – the appropriate ward to be transformed into space  for patients with coronavirus. However this wing has never been used by anyone with coronavirus! They have a specific area in the church, here in Korydallos, where they place someone who has coronavirus. Therefore if he is also religious, he can pray for his health… “. 

The same is true for the quarantine areas, where those who enter the prison (new detainees, from transfers, etc.) must stay for up to 14 days. They have 3-4 cells in the 4th wing, the so-called ‘discipline / isolation cells’, which are crowded by 15 people and where people going in and coming out stay in quarantine. They are all together, and no protocol is in use. They placed all the suspect cases there, where all the prisoners were together. In the same area both healthy and suspect cases can be found, there is no separation”, concludes Dimakis.

Why did the Greek government not carry out decongestion 

According to research, one of the main strategies taken by European governments to tackle the coronavirus in prisons was to decongest the prisons. Greece, however, never proceeded with this measure. During the first wave, many countries across Europe released an unprecedented number of inmates in order to reduce the pressure in prisons. “It was what experts were telling them to do for years, but it was very scary at a  political level,” said Catherine Heard, director of the World Prison Research Program. “I believe that Covid has given many countries an excuse to quietly reduce the number of their detainees.”

Heard calculated that the number of prisoners has probably been reduced by about half a million people internationally between March 2020 and June 2021. Countries such as Slovenia, Belgium, France and Italy, which were all running at full capacity, reduced their inmate populations by up to 25%, to their official capacity number or lower. “A lesson that these countries have been taught is that they managed to reduce their number of inmates without the world coming to an end” says Heard. With the pandemic offering a public-health reason to reduce prison populations, she highlights that it is vital for these prisons to maintain this ideal. 

On the other hand, the Greek government never got the memo, and never proceeded with reducing the number of inmates to de-escalate Covid conditions in prisons. Why this happened is described by Dimakis: “Mrs Nikolaou and the right wing government could not manage the decongestion. Because she probably considered it tragic to re-create a somewhat similar law such as the Paraskevopoulos law (a 2015 decongestion law enacted by the previous left wing government of SYRIZA, that was hardly criticized by the Nea Dimokratia-ND right wing party) was a key pre-election flag for the ND party, along with the ‘crime’ agenda and the terror around this issue. In case they did something similar and applied a Paraskevopoulos law, or even  a more improved one, they would have had an issue because the central part of the Right did not allow it and would not allow such a thing to happen, as to let all the ‘criminals’ out”.

However, when we asked the General Secretariat for Anti-Crime Policy about the actions taken regarding the management of overcrowding in prisons, they answered that “regarding the reduction of the number of inmates or other ways of decongestion with reduction of sentences, etc., these are actions that concern the Ministry of Justice and the competent authorities. The General Secretariat proceeded with mass transfers from overcrowded detention centers to others which had available space. For example more than 1,000 convicts were transferred specifically from the Korydallos prison to others in the region. Thus, Korydallos was turned into a prison exclusively for convicts”. They also pointed to plans of the General Secretariat for the construction of six new prisons.

However, a specific act of the Ministry of Justice seems to have aggravated the conditions of overpopulation by putting a brake on the transfer of prisoners. It is law 4670/2020, that brought about changes in the licensing process and limited the conditions that allow the transfer of a detainee both to the rural prisons and to the Central Prison Material Warehouse. A portion of the press characterized the law as “photographic” in order not to allow Dimitris Koufontinas (convicted in 2007 for his involvement with the left wing armed group “17 November”) to remain in the Agricultural Prisons of Kassavetia, Volos. But the law also had a side effect. In the midst of a pandemic, it left rural prison licenses and other detention facilities overcrowded. The Special Agricultural Detention Center of Kassavetia in January 2022 was 31.8% full. In Agia Chania the figure was 30.3%, in Kassandra Halkidiki 28.2%, and in Tiryns Argolida 13.9%. Meanwhile, in most of the country’s detention facilities, detainees were stacked on top of each other.

As part of the investigation, we requested an interview with the Secretary General of Anti-Crime Policy, Sofia Nikolaou, when he was still in this position. However, Mrs Nikolaou refused to accord it.