The inquiry by Mr Justice Keith into the murder in Feltham Young Offender Institution of Zahid Mubarek has produced a near-unbelievable catalogue of the most chronic incompetence in the running of this prison. Mubarek was confined in a cell with a known psychopathic racist who one night beat him to death with a weapon made from a table leg. Mubarek’s murder was appalling, and the chaos and incompetence in the prison simply beggar belief. The Telegraph reports:

The judge described the ‘pernicious and dangerous cocktail’ of poor communications and shoddy work practices at Feltham that allowed prison officers to be ignorant of the danger Stewart posed. He was involved in a prison killing two years earlier and had written a racist letter referring to ‘niggers’ and ‘pakis’.

The officer who put Stewart into the cell with Mubarek knew ‘literally nothing’ about his violent past, his files were not read, and officers appeared not to notice that Stewart had begun to dismantle a table in his cell. ‘If an event as rare as a homicide in prison, coupled with Stewart’s suspected involvement in it … was not sufficient to warrant some thought being given to the risk he might pose, it is difficult to imagine what would,’ said Mr Justice Keith. At the heart of it, he said, was a ‘catastrophic breakdown in communications’ not just between one prison and another, but also within individual prisons. ‘Vital information was not passed on. And when it was, it was often not acted upon.’

Mr Justice Keith said Feltham, which was identified in the mid-1990s as failing on many fronts, was simply being asked to do too much. Its inmates ‘got a raw deal’. ‘The long and short of it was that Feltham was being required to do too much, with too many prisoners, too few staff, insufficient resources and a local branch of the Prison Officers’ Association which was opposed to change.’ The judge made 88 recommendations and took the unusual step of naming 19 individuals he saw as responsible for the failures that led to Mubarek’s death. It was for the Prison Service to decide whether ‘heads should roll’.

All utterly shocking and inexcusable, and deserving of the strongest possible strictures. But Mr Justice Keith did not stop there. He went on to suggest recognition of something he called ‘institutional religious intolerance’.

Eh?

Where did this institution display religious intolerance? The murder was committed by a racist who may or may not have hated Muslims; he certainly hated Asians. The prison officers were neglectful and incompetent, but where were they intolerant of religion? Information wasn’t passed on; there were shoddy work practices; the officer who locked Mubarek into a cell with Stewart is said to have known nothing about Stewart’s violent past. Yes, the judge also said that officers placed unsuitable inmates in the same cell to cause discontent. Brutal, neglectful, vindictive, and some of them were racist — but intolerant of religion? And even if they were, that does not necessarily mean ‘institutional’ prejudice. That term means that from top to bottom at Feltham, from the governor to the lowliest prison officer, the prison was run on the basis of religious intolerance. It is a blanket labelling of an institution which damns everyone within it.

By employing such a term, Mr Justice Keith has opened the way for the prison service to descend into precisely the same Orwellian paralysis that has gripped the police service ever since it was branded ‘institutionally racist’ by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of the black south London teenager Stephen Lawrence.

That disgraceful finding effectively damned every serving police officer as a racist, and caused a loss of professional nerve within the police from which it has never recovered. But the label was a false one. What the police were guilty of in that case was institutional incompetence, rather as seems to have been the case at Feltham. Even more alarming is Mr Justice Keith’s recommendation that, just as Macpherson turned racism into a subjective finding, so that an act was to be deemed racist merely if someone said it was, so ‘religious intolerance’ should be similarly defined by anyone who claimed to be the victim of it.

This opens the way for people to be deemed guilty of religious intolerance against Muslims merely by talking about, for example, ‘Islamist terrorism’ — the use of which term immediately attracts vilification as ‘Islamophobia’. Such subjective definitions — just like ‘institutional’ prejudice findings themselves — are pernicious; they are monumentally unfair, coercive and have the capacity to shut down legitimate and necessary speech. Another of Mr Justice Keith’s recommendations is that the role of prison imams should be expanded. But in other quarters, there is growing alarm that extremist imams are steadily radicalising prison inmates to jihad without the prison authorities doing anything to stop it. Would raising such a concern also now fall into the category of ‘institutional religious intolerance’?

In these circumstances, suc h institutionalised politcal correctness could have positively lethal consequences. Whatever the validity of the other proposals in this report, the Home Secretary should stamp on this one hard.