In view of the new condemnation of Greece by the European Court of Human Rights for the inhuman conditions of detention in penitentiaries (Logothetis and others v. Greece), as well as the radical restructuring of the Substantive Criminal Law and the Code of Criminal Procedure, the need to decongest prisons, without causing risks to public safety and dilemmas for the public's sense of justice, with the ultimate aim of upgrading the living conditions of prisoners from degrading to humane conditions, has become more urgent and topical than ever.
Specifically, in the case Logothetis and others v. Greece, the ECHR condemned Greece for violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, according to which:
"no person shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"
Thus, the Court held that the conditions of detention in Nafplio prison were inhuman and degrading, violating the very essence of human dignity, mainly due to overcrowding, and upheld the application of 16 Greek, Romanian, Ukrainian, Turkish and American prisoners, ordering Greece to pay each of the applicants damages ranging from 5.000 to EUR 15 000 and EUR 2 000 jointly for legal costs and expenses.
These ECtHR convictions (see also Nieciecki v. Greece, a temporary prisoner in Korydallos prison, and Tzamalis and Others v. Greece, with 14 applicants imprisoned in Ioannina prison) demonstrate and document the blindness or indifference of Greek society to issues of degrading treatment and punishment of human beings and the repeated violation of fundamental human rights under the auspices, tolerance or acquiescence of the institutionalised state power.
According to official data from the Ministry of Justice, there are 12,703 prisoners in the 34 detention centres across the country, when there are 9,2861 places available. In Korydallos prison there are 2270 prisoners against 1070 places. The situation is similar in most of the country's penitentiaries, such as the Thessaloniki detention centre, where there are 590 prisoners and 370 places.
Recently, the state, in order to reduce the congestion in prisons, introduced with law 4205/2013 the institution of house arrest with electronic surveillance of suspects, convicts and prisoners. This new institution of quasi-alternative serving of sentences aims, as explicitly stated in the explanatory memorandum of the law in question, "to contribute to the decongestion of prisons from convicts already detained there without any risk to public security2".
In particular, electronic monitoring is provided for both at the pre-trial stage as a restrictive condition preceding provisional detention and at the stage of serving the prescribed sentence as a voluntary quasi-alternative sentence that coincides with the well-known institution of conditional release. The voluntary nature of inclusion in electronic surveillance removes any doubts as to the compatibility of the institution with the constitutional requirements of the protection of privacy and human dignity, to the extent, of course, that basic personal aspects of the prisoner's life are excluded from surveillance, while the exclusion of those who have committed crimes of particular criminal gravity from the possibility of inclusion in electronic surveillance (e.g.e.g. rape, intentional homicide) maintains a balance between the need to reduce prison congestion and satisfy the public's sense of justice.
The purpose of electronic surveillance as a restrictive condition is to substitute temporary detention so that it is imposed as the absolute last measure of procedural coercion, while as an alternative way of serving the sentence, following the serving of part of it within the penitentiary institution, it aims at a gradual and smooth transition for the convict from the regime of deprivation of liberty to free social life, with the ultimate aim, in both cases, of reducing the congestion in Greek prisons and improving the living conditions of prisoners.
Finally, it is also worth noting the contrary opinion, which was in the minority when the explanatory memorandum was drafted, according to which the addition of new criminal measures entails a 'net widening' of the web of criminal control. According to that view, instead of being applied to a part of the population in prison, thereby reducing the prison population, the new measures are in fact imposed on persons who, in the absence of those measures, would not have ended up in prison, thus placing a burden on the prison system, which they seek to alleviate.
To sum up, the series of condemnatory judgments of the European Court of Human Rights against Greece as well as the official statistics on the situation in the country's penitentiary institutions highlight the -already known- inhuman and degrading conditions of detention of prisoners in these institutions as a contemporary problem of major social importance, revealing at the same time the downgraded position of human dignity on the pedestal of the value standards of modern Greek society. Alternative measures for serving sentences and restrictive conditions, such as electronic home surveillance, with the aim of reducing prison congestion and providing specific prevention through the correction of the offender, are, in the author's opinion, moving in the right direction, although they are not sufficient in themselves, because they respect both the personality of the offender and the need to satisfy the public's sense of justice. The only thing capable of confirming or refuting these expectations is the daily practice of the criminal repression mechanism and the prison system, which, in turn, must incorporate the fundamental principle of human dignity into its value system.
Thomas Kalokiris
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