The smallest prison in the world

It is the size of a garden shed, it has two cells, and until recently it was described as the smallest working prison in the world.

There is almost nothing to see.

1856

There has been somewhere to put people on Sark for a very long time. Before this building, prisoners were held informally, first in the stone undercroft of the Arsenal near the Manoir, and later in a hovel under the Granary that served as a jail into the nineteenth century. Anything serious went to Castle Cornet in Guernsey, where the courts were.

The building that stands today went up in 1856. Two cells. A barrel roof. A date stone that reads A.D. 1856.

How it was used

Sparingly, is the honest answer.

The island’s old powers allowed somebody to be held for up to two days. Anything longer meant the boat to Guernsey, as it still does for serious matters. So the prison’s working life was mostly short stays, somewhere to be until morning rather than a sentence.

The building is still used occasionally today, when it is needed, rather than kept purely as a museum piece. Most of the time the green door, the barrel roof and the date stone are the whole show.

What a two cell prison means

A prison this small says more about how few people live on Sark than about how gentle any of them are. Sark is policed by two volunteer Constables and two volunteer Assistant Constables, working a fortnight on and a fortnight off, backed up by volunteer Special Constables when needed. Anything serious still goes to Guernsey Police. It has worked this way, in one form or another, since the Constable’s job was to walk the island and know who everyone was, long before radios or patrol cars existed. When there are a few hundred of you, and everybody knows whose boat that is and whose dog that is, most of what policing does elsewhere is already being done by simply being known.

That has a cost, and I would not pretend otherwise. There is no anonymity here. If you want to disappear into a crowd, this is the wrong island.

But it is also part of why the island feels the way it does. Sark’s one prison spent most of its working life empty, and now stands retired. A shed with two cells is what a very small community’s whole history of crime looks like from the outside.

Two minutes on the way past

It is not signposted with any great enthusiasm, and it will not detain you, which is a joke the island has been making at its own expense for a long time.

Two minutes, and then the rest of the afternoon is yours.

If you are working out how to get here in the first place, the Getting to Sark guide covers the whole journey. And if a week at this pace appeals, the 2027 retreats are built around it.