KEY POINTS:
Funny, isn't it, how everything has to be built in time for the 2011 rugby World Cup. An adequate stadium I can understand. But finishing State Highway 20?
Now Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor has added to the list, vowing to build a replacement for Mt Eden Prison by
kick-off, 2011. Lager louts beware.
Mind you, with the prison's service's recent record of building cost and time blow-outs, and the history of delays in replacing Auckland's Victorian-era jail, I'm not holding my breath. Since 1995, the prison service has been pushing for the closure or extensive refurbishment of this barbaric relic, only to be rebuffed by government after government.
In early 2000, then Corrections Minister Matt Robson hoped to close it by 2003. In 2004, its 420 beds were still packed tight despite a secret departmental warning to his replacement, Mr O'Connor, that "there is a high likelihood of service failure" at the prison, "the consequences of which would be catastrophic".
By that, the department meant "potential injury or loss of life", litigation by inmates' families and the possibility of having to rehouse all prisoners suddenly.
At the time, Mr O'Connor had just returned from a tour of European prisons and was suggesting the best way to empty Mt Eden would be to give 30 per cent of our prison population community-based sentences instead.
It seems four years in the job has stamped such wimpish talk out of him, and increased incarceration is now seen as the electorally safe way to go. But at what cost? As National's law and order spokesman, Simon Power, delighted in pointing out, the last 500 extra beds added to the Government's prisons building programmes cost taxpayers nearly $1 million each. By that reckoning, the recently opened Auckland Regional Women's Prison at Wiri was a bargain at $158 million, or $552,447 for each of the 286 beds.
At Mt Eden they're planning 450 new beds, plus refurbishment of the existing historic building for administrative purposes. There's no talk of costs, but if the women's prison costs are any indication, we're talking enough money to fund a fine stadium - or a massive apartment block or three.
Which does get you thinking. As Auckland is the city of prison-like apartment blocks, why doesn't the Government throw this exercise over to the market and leave it to do its worst.
Alternatively, Corrections could take the lead from Judge Robert Kerr, who in 2000, remanded an alleged heroin dealer facing extradition charges, to "house arrest" in a Hobson St apartment block, much to the chagrin of his neighbours who, among other things, didn't enjoy sharing the exercise room with him and his two burly Chubb guards.
Still, if Corrections were to buy a whole apartment block, complaining neighbours would not be a problem. And a block in Hobson St would also solve the problem of transporting prisoners back and forth to the district court. They could form energy-saving walking buses and come by foot.
The professional apartment builders do, you have to admit, seem to have it all over Corrections, as far as costs are concerned.
Remember, the new Auckland Women's prison cost $552,447 a bed. I wonder what Conrad Properties developer extraordinaire Robert Holden, for example, could have built it for?
Everywhere you look these days, he's busy pumping utilitarian blocks of self-own apartments into the inner city sky at a fraction of the prison cost.
The average retail cost of the 417 two-bedroom apartments in The Volt, on the corner of Queen St and Mayoral Drive, for example is $286,000, which is a mere $143,000 a bed - and with that you get a kitchen with appliances, lounge and all mod-cons.
Can a few rolls of razor wire add so much more to the price?
I'd be delighted if Mr O'Connor dug out his notes from his 2003 European junket and started talking about reducing the prison population, not expanding it. But either way, closing Mt Eden Prison is long overdue, so here's hoping this is one 2011 deadline that is met.
