Prison reopens doors as tourist attraction

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The old Dunedin Prison has been accepting its first inmates in years, but they are tourists rather than hardened criminals.

The Dunedin Prison Charitable Trust bought the former prison last year with the aim of turning it into a tourist attraction. Recently the first guided tours, conducted by two former Dunedin Prison employees, have been walking its otherwise abandoned corridors.

Public tours will run right through the month until March 30.

Dunedin Prison Trust chairman Stewart Harvey said the tours would give people a chance to poke their heads in the door and see what was happening in the prison.

The trust is employing Sydney-based heritage consultants MUSEcape to draw up a conservation plan for the prison. Once the plan was complete, the trust would know what kind of work would need to be done and would have a fundraising target, Mr Harvey said.

One option might be restoring the prison to the state it was in early in its lifetime, he said.

Mr Harvey estimated the conservation project would take years and would be a multimillion-dollar effort.

''It's going to be a long road,'' he said.

The prison, which is built from 919,000 bricks, was opened on June 16, 1898.

It was intended to house 59 prisoners but had held as many as 72 on some occasions.

Some of the prisoners were high-profile, such as David Bain, and ''baby-farmer'' Minnie Dean, who was housed there before her execution for multiple infanticide in Invercargill.

The Dunedin prison has never been the site of an execution or flogging, although there had been suicides, escapes and the 1966 murder of Constable Donald Stokes by two prisoners trying to escape.

Before its 2009 closure, the building was used for many purposes, including being both a men's and a women's prison, a Security Intelligence Service (SIS) office and a police station.

- by Jonathan Chilton-Towles