Elizabeth Aitken Rose: We get the prisons we are prepared to pay for

Mt Eden Prison looms larger than most anticipated. Photo / Greg Bowker

New Zealanders pride themselves on breaking records and perhaps the most impressive is the rate at which they lock people up and throw away ongoing responsibility.

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies (Kings College, London) New Zealand has the fifth highest rate of incarceration per head of population in the OECD - after the United States, Chile, Poland and the Czech Republic.

And well ahead of Australia.

Penitentiaries are an uncomfortable consequence of a society tough on crime. Where they go and their cost is, however, a matter of inflamed public conjecture and we would rather them swept away from the urban gaze.

The forbidding form of Auckland's newest prison looms large over the Southern Motorway. Politicians, professionals and principals duck - it is a larger, gloomier, shadier and more embarrassingly obvious human cage than anyone anticipated when Government, council commissioners and school officials signed it off in 2007.

Indeed citizens, neighbouring schools and the Auckland City Council - politicians and planners - had little say over the height, bulk and location of any building taking shape for "prison purposes". The land was subject to a historic designation conferring the Department of Corrections with an archaic right to develop whatever it chose provided it conformed in function.

Community boards and council professionals undoubtedly did their best to ameliorate the worst of the inevitable, but were restricted to cosmetic adjustments. Contemporary urban design values have modest sway in a litigious environment.

From a correctional perspective, the locality addresses essential needs. It is close to the courts and a perfect situation for the requisite remand centre.

Prisons are space-hungry creations. The department already owned this substantial site and did not have to enter into negotiation for an alternative in the city's inner industrial regions, which would not only have been expensive and prone to litigation, but would have locked up land better suited to economic development and employment generation.

It also permitted Auckland to house its felons in situ, without the risk and expense of transportation to other towns equally reluctant to provide secure lodgings. Undergrounding the carparks might have reduced the eyesore elevation of the building, but the cost of doing so in basalt landscape would have chewed through the budget.

Urban amenity is not Correction's core business. Going up - instead of out - was a major justification for the design selected. It will protect the original Mt Eden prison, a New Zealand Historic Places Trust Category 1 building judged to have "special or outstanding historical or cultural heritage significance or value".

While tourists atop Maungawhau/Mt Eden suffer the indignity of an impeded view, they will be able to experience colonial Victorian prison architecture and history of Auckland's penal practices in the planned heritage museum.

Prisons are not only designed to constrain, but are often intentionally symbolic. Once mere staging posts before the gallows, they evolved into punitive warehouses for those who failed to conform and are deemed a moral hazard to the society that produced them.

Prisons, like sewers, are an indispensable element of city life. At times they aspire to the ideal of rehabilitation, more often they are purely places for recycling or containing social excrement.

An incarcerating urge was present in Auckland's early colonial history.

The first jail was built on the waterfront in 1840 and the second a year later on Queen St.

It soon became overcrowded and a new prison was built in the 1880s, in stone quarried from Mt Eden by prisoners. Its design followed the English state prison model and was intended to serve as a grim deterrent - undoubtedly it continues to perform this invaluable function for the adjacent boys' schools.

It remains to be seen whether the new structure, when disguised as a glass-sheathed office block, will do the same for motorists.

There have been repeated attempts to banish the prison from this inner-city suburb. Plans invariably failed because of funding shortages. In the end citizens get the prisons they are prepared to pay for - in places offering least resistance.

Of greater importance is whether we need them on this scale. Japan, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Switzerland and other economically successful OECD nations incarcerate their populations at almost two-thirds less the rate of New Zealand.

If we choose to continue, it is best they remain in the civic heartland. They are an undignified, unsettling part of us.

* Elizabeth Aitken Rose is acting head, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland.