“NOT fit, our policing; not fit, our prisons; not fit, our detention system.” So writes the Chair of the Institute of Race Relations Colin Prescod in Dying for Justice, the institute’s report into deaths in custody.

More than 500 people from black and minority ethnic communities have died in British police premises, prisons and immigration removal centres over the last two decades, locked away and secreted in “the closed world of custody” and, alongside the brave families of the bereaved, the book continues the process of opening up this clandestine and stygian territory of British life and death to scrutiny.

It investigates the abuses of incarceration and detention, graphically showing that as the privatisation of their resources continues apace as a growth industry, so accessibility and accountability lessens accordingly.

It details some of the most prominent and grotesque cases, from that of Christopher Alder, dying in a Hull police station in 1998, to the suicide of 23-year-old Michael Bailey in a Rye Hill prison cell in Warwickshire in 2005, the murder of teenager Zahid Mubarek killed by a crazed and racist fellow detainee in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution in 2000 and the violent death of Jimmy Mubenga in 2010. He died on the floor of a British Airways plane at Heathrow after being restrained by three guards of the private security firm G4S while being deported to Angola.

There are powerfully written supportive articles showing the resistance and campaigning of bereaved families.

Alder’s sister Janet writes an eloquent testimony and there is a collective statement by close relatives of Mark Duggan, Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester and Cynthia Jarrett.

The struggle to give publicity to these and other cases is described by Ken Fero of Migrant Media and Ryan Erfani-Ghettani contributes an insightful commentary on how the character of Gardner was caricatured and defamed by the Establishment press.

Deborah Coles, co-director of Inquest, reminds us how covert deaths in custody “are not rare or isolated instances but raise important issues of state power and accountability.” Because of that, Dying for Justice is indispensable reading and a crucial disclosure of a continuing and hellish deformation in British institutional life.

• Dying for Justice is available for download at irr.org.uk

Review by Chris Searle