This is a welcome addition to the literature on confinement, a topic that has developed from a little-studied phenomenon into one of most vibrant areas within the subdiscipline of Conflict Archaeology. Gilly Carr has been a part of this through her work on the Channel Islands during the Second World War. She has been investigating Lager Wick, a forced labour camp on Jersey, and has many publications on the impact of WWII on the Channel Islands.
This new book examines the prisons used by the Occupation forces to imprison Channel Islanders who were considered to be political threats. Some of these people (men and women) had committed criminal acts of sabotage, theft of military materials, plotted assassinations, and so on. Others were imprisoned for being vocal in their opposition to the Occupation, for black marketeering (which seemed to cover any exchange of goods, including acts of charity), or for refusing to obey the orders of the occupiers.
The prisons on Jersey and on Guernsey were used to hold prisoners while they were interrogated/tortured, before being either held for the duration of their sentence (if less than six months) or while awaiting transfer to prison facilities or concentration camps in France or the German Reich. The picture is complicated by the fact that both prisons were run as joint entities between the Island authorities and the Occupation force, so that there were areas of the prisons under German military control and others under Islander civil authority. Conditions varied between the two, although none was particularly pleasant.
