ABSTRACT

Mr Justice Keith’s report painstakingly documented the catalogue of failures in the prison service that contributed to Zahid Mubarek’s murder, linking a string of “systemic shortcomings” in all of the prison establishments where Robert Stewart had been incarcerated with the “culture of indifference and insensitivity which institutional racism breeds”. This chapter attempts to address the questions by applying psychoanalytical insights to the many letters Stewart wrote in prison and the voluminous records and reports placed in the public domain about him during the course of the Mubarek Inquiry. Having denied that he was a racist during his trial, Stewart’s written admission to the Inquiry five years later that “racial prejudice played some part” in his murderous behaviour was potentially revealing. S. Freud’s own description of the melancholic captures Robert Stewart even more precisely than Paul Gilroy’s formulation. Robert Stewart seems to have been prone to adopting the kind of acutely persecutory, incessantly retributive mentality.