By Dominic Casciani BBC News community affairs reporter

The murder of Zahid Mubarek "shocked and dismayed" the inquiry

In the months before the publication of the Zahid Mubarek inquiry, a question loomed over the entire proceedings.

With so much time having passed since the teenager's death in March 2000, would it actually achieve anything or be a lame duck, giving comfort to the family and little else?

Mr Justice Keith has surprised many by producing a raft of damning conclusions that, despite improvements in individual jails like Feltham, raise important questions about how the UK deals with the worst and most dangerous members of its society.

What's clear from the inquiry's conclusions is that the chairman and his panel were shocked that Robert Stewart, a psychopath with racist tendencies, came to kill his cellmate hours before the Asian teenager was due to be released.

When he began the inquiry, Mr Justice Keith, a public law specialist who spent a decade at the Hong Kong Court of Appeal, said he had a different view of British prisons. He finished his report "shocked and dismayed" by what he had heard and seen.

The conclusions - almost 200 identifiable failings and 19 individuals named - go beyond just making the very obvious point that something should have been done to stop the death.

They pointedly demand of government to think very carefully the point of prison and whether putting more people in jail (the UK currently has a record prison population) achieves anything if nobody is prepared to put the money in too.

Inertia

Throughout the report, Mr Justice Keith points repeatedly to institutional failings suggesting a system that, at the time of the murder at least, simply did not appear to function.

Failings include bewildering levels of incompetence or muddle when it came to simple matters like passing on security information about the dangers prisoners posed.

Mr Justice Keith surprised many with his damning conclusions

The Mubarek inquiry found that jail reception officers very often had no clue about a new inmate, other than his name and most recent offences.

At the other end of the spectrum are two seemingly separate forces of institutional inertia or negligence that combined with lethal force.

Feltham and other prisons in 2000 come across as places incapable of recognising racism while also being hobbled when it came to dealing with severely disturbed prisoners.

In the case of Robert Stewart, there was no collective recognition, no institutional memory, of the terrifying nature of his character.

When he fantasised about being the head of a neo-Nazi gang after watching a violent film, gouged the eye of another prisoner years before, played a supporting role in the murder of another prisoner by his best mate and other horrific behaviour, nobody was really asking what he would do next.

And so the subtext of the report, six years on, is whether anyone can be sure the Prison Service today is any nearer being fit for purpose if the same circumstances were recreated today.

So what happens now?

There are 88 recommendations and Home Secretary John Reid has said he has immediately accepted 50 of them.

But some of the key issues of the inquiry go beyond basic management decisions in the Home Office and demand some serious thinking.

Racism and prejudice

One of the boldest steps by Mr Justice Keith, other than to name names, has been to call on the Prison Service to think about whether it should recognise a new concept of institutional religious intolerance.

This recommendation brings the inquiry very close to what many campaigners have hoped it would be, a kind of Stephen Lawrence moment for prisons.

The reality of prisons, and particularly young offenders' institutes, is complex with competing identities among inmates who swing between being vulnerable to extremely dangerous.

Mr Justice Keith's call is for more investment in the realities of these identities and the efforts staff take to understand who the prisoners are in an effort to turn out productive members of society.

Prison numbers

But the report's most dramatic move has been to root itself in the present, rather than in events of 2000, by putting prison numbers on the agenda.

The jail population is at a high of almost 78,000, about 1,500 below its maximum capacity.

Feltham, as is widely acknowledged in this report and others, imploded in the run up to Zahid's death because it could not cope with the inmate numbers as staff morale declined and working practices unravelled.

"If the money made available to the Prison Service is simply not enough at a time when the prison population continues to increase, ministers must find the extra funding to enable the delivery of a proper regime for the inmates it is required to hold," says Mr Justice Keith.

"When it comes to competing with hospitals and schools for public funds, prisons will invariably come third. But as Churchill said, societies are judged by the way they treat their prisoners, and if more resources are needed to ensure that our prisons are truly representative of the civilised society which we aspire to be, nothing less will do."