KEY POINTS:
If we were seeking a bright side to the $216.3 million cost of a new Mt Eden men's prison, it's that at $480,666 per bed, it's a lot cheaper than the $552,447 a bed cost of the $158 million women's prison at Wiri, opened last year. But it's
still a lot of hard-earned cash. No wonder it's taken the Labour-led Government eight years to honour the promise made by its first Corrections Minister, Matt Robson, to close this disgraceful Victorian relic.
Given the more productive things that could be done with the money, it's perhaps a pity Mr Robson's successor, Damien O'Connor, didn't follow through with the alternative solution he put up in 2004, following a tour of European prisons. Obviously under the influence of the more enlightened incarceration policy that reigns in the places he visited, Mr O'Connor rendered local law and order evangelists all weak at the knees by proposing that the best way to empty Mt Eden would be to give 30 per cent of our prison population community-based sentences instead.
Of course, with large numbers of New Zealand voters signing petitions to bring back the right to beat their children, such namby-pambyism was never going to fly. The hardliners will probably still be aghast that in the new prison, prisoners will no longer be expected to share a plastic lavatory bucket with their cellmate.
When Mr Robson signalled his intention back in 2000, my initial instinct was to back knocking this place of our collective shame down, selling the prime city fringe site, and using the proceeds to fund a replacement. But obliterating your mistakes doesn't make things right.
Also, on a practical level, not only is selling off Crown land a fraught business these days, what with all sorts of potential claimants lurking in the shadows, but finding an alternative site would be nigh impossible. From bitter experience, the prison services knows that no one wants a prison next door.
Renovating the old building as prison administration space with, to use latest Corrections Minister Phil Goff's words, "the northern wing perhaps being converted into a museum" sometime in the future, seems a good solution.
There have been suggestions to turn the place into a backpackers hostel, or a boutique hotel. Across the Tasman, the old Castlemaine Gaol in the heart of the Victorian goldfields lets you stay overnight in the cells, and offers full-scale facilities for conventions and seminars. It does "murder mystery" sleepovers, and locks groups up overnight for "grown-up parties".
To me, exploiting Mt Eden in such a way, for the present at least, would be pretty tasteless. Sitting down for a meal in a place of such recent misery, a place where several recent suicides have occurred, would have been crass. Thankfully, it appears the minister and his advisers were of a similar mind.
On a less bizarre level, from Alcatraz in San Francisco to the Port Arthur jail in Hobart, sightseeing through such places drags in tourists. Professionally curated, a tour through the jail might be just the thing to bring errant youngsters to heel, and add a historic diversion to the tourist trail up Mt Eden.
Mt Eden Prison was not just the home of many of our most notorious criminals. It also hosted political leaders like John A Lee and Bob Semple. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography records how in 1911, Lee, "after twice being arrested - once for smuggling liquor into the King Country, once for breaking and entering - was sent for 12 months to Mount Eden prison, Auckland. He reputedly heard through the bars of his cell window socialist orators such as Bob Semple and Harry Scott Bennett."
Started in 1885, using prison labour, it's one of Auckland's oldest buildings. With the old Fitzroy Hotel, built in 1855, on death watch, and getting no support from public authorities, it would seem careless to even think of encouraging the owners of the Fitzroy or any other imperilled old building, by knocking this or any other old public building down.
It mightn't be a place we're proud of. But that's because of the use we made of it. For that reason alone, it should be left as a salutary reminder of the need to do better. But mostly, it should be left as is because, as old buildings go, it's one of the few left.
