Two by two by two they rise, lifted and put in place by a massive crane.

This is construction inspired by Duplo, precast concrete modules — with two jail cells per — laid out in neat rows and stacked into towers.

It's not quite prison-in-a-kit, but it's close: a “habitat” for human miscreants, some assembly required.

In a first for the province, if not the country, the new Toronto South Detention Centre in Mimico is being built almost entirely from prefabricated pieces, including hundreds of fully outfitted jail cells shipped by rail from Atlanta.

“You stack it up and the building's basically done,” says Alan Munn, senior partner with Zeidler Partnership Architects.

The units come complete with windows, doors, lights, wiring and fully plumbed toilets and sinks.

“These are facilities that get a lot of abuse, so they have to be extremely durable,” says Munn.

Prison building is, not surprisingly, a huge niche market in the United States, which is why Zeidler turned to South Carolina-based Tindall Corp., a private company that has done nearly 200 prefab prisons south of the border.

Tindall's standard module contains two jail cells, with each cell measuring 85 square feet and laid out as a mirror image of the adjacent one, although Zeidler has tweaked both the size and configuration to conform to provincial tastes and building codes.

Given the climate, for instance, the beds aren't stacked on an outside wall as they would be in a typical prefabricated cell.

When it's completed in the fall of 2012 as a replacement for the 19th-century Don Jail, the $600 million facility will boast three seven-storey towers and a total of 1,650 beds.

Although principally a maximum-security complex, it will also include a new Toronto Intermittent Centre for those serving weekend sentences.

Such modular assembly — of which Moshe Safdie's Habitat for Expo 67 in Montreal still stands as a sterling example — has long intrigued both architects and the construction industry.

The attractions are many.

There's the relative speed and ease of assembly, for one, plus a big reduction in the amount of on-site waste.

And having the modules built elsewhere in a controlled-environment factory both helps with quality control and removes the seasonal vagaries of weather.

In the case of Tindall's jail cells, the precast, concrete modules are also strong and integrated enough that they can be load-bearing.

“There's no need to build big frames,” says Cory Paterson, one of the company's technical sales representatives.

While the firm has looked into using similar modules for hotels and military barracks, it has yet to construct any.

So, at least for now, it's mostly prisons by Duplo, which seems to hold an additional, prurient attraction for otherwise law-abiding onlookers, says Paterson.

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“For some reason, when our modules roll into town, they get a lot of attention.”

“It's amazing to watch how a facility like this goes up,” agrees Bruce Gray, a vice-president at Infrastructure Ontario, who has also been known to visit the site at least in part for its Boy's Own entertainment value.

“You're not watching it one stick at a time. It's going up in blocks.”