5 Cents Stockton; PoW Camp

American PoW canteen scrip from the Stockton, California facility — one of hundreds of camp-issue currencies produced domestically during the war years under the Geneva Convention obligation to provide canteen access to prisoners. The scrip system kept German and Italian PoWs from accumulating U.S. legal tender, which could theoretically aid escape attempts. Stockton's agricultural labor program was among the more extensive in California, and prisoners here were paid in scrip earned through farmwork on surrounding valley crops.

Campbell catalog coverage of domestic PoW scrip is notoriously incomplete, and Camb#8519 references a series where surviving examples are genuinely uncommon — most camp scrip was destroyed or discarded at repatriation.