Speaking to the radio station Kokkino FM, Vasiliki Katrivanou, an MP for Syriza who took part in the prison visit, described how the psychiatric wing is both intensely overcrowded and chronically understaffed.
Particularly shocking, according to the MP, are the so called ‘blue cells’: the rubber padded solitary confinement rooms used to isolate individuals when they become unruly. According to interviews with prison staff, Ms Katrivannou said, inmates can be locked in such rooms for up to five days at a time, in the nude. The rooms have no toilet facilities meaning that inmates must call for prison staff when they need to go to the bathroom. If they are unable to do so they end up ‘doing what they need to do right there.’ Ms Katrivanou said she acknowledged the difficulty of handling mentally ill prisoners but said the solitary confinement conditions were ‘medieval’.
Prisoners who have been released from Korydallos jail have previously alleged that the blue cells are also used to punish regular inmates for bad behaviour. In April of 2013, 31-year-old former inmate Dimitris Kopanas told a press conference, “Let me tell you about the blue cells of the psychiatric ward. They are spaces two meters by two meters with a three meter ceiling and an air conditioner. For 15 minutes they put on cold air, with the prisoner naked, and from cold they put it on full heat and they keep you for 2 or 3 days until you become a ‘good boy.’ They open the door and chuck you a plastic container with food which you have to eat with your hands without a fork. I was kept in a blue cell for 4 days because I refused a cavity search.”
According to Ms Katrivanou 259 prisoners are currently being treated in the psychiatric ward which is only designed to hold a maximum of 160 inmates. Even though many of the prisoners are suffering from severe mental health problems, there is no permanent psychiatric doctor on staff, with patients receiving what little treatment they get from a rotating pool of doctors who only visit the prison for a few hours a day.
Similar problems were also observed in the prison hospital which is also severely overcrowded. Patients, many of whom have weakened immune systems due to HIV infections, are crammed, literally one on top of the other, in bunk-beds. One ward intended for 7 patients held 17. “They treat us like animals,” one inmate is reported to have told the MPs, with drugs for HIV treatment often delayed.
Furthermore, Ms Katrivanou said, there are many cases of patients with infections of multi-antibiotic resistant strains of tuberculosis in the hospital, who will simply be released without further treatment after serving their sentences posing a health risk to the general public.
Together with the inmates, prison staff also suffered in the inhumane working conditions which, according to the MP, have arisen due to lack of political will. “It is not just economics,” Ms Katrivanou told the radio station, “but a question of priorities and the political will to change it. When the state is spending so much money for the creation of new maximum security prisons, let’s give a portion of the funds to improve the inhumane and dangerous conditions the inmates and correctional staff are currently being subjected to.”