  We study a class of three dimensional exactly solvable models of topological
matter first put forward by Walker and Wang [arXiv:1104.2632v2]. While these
are not models of interacting fermions, they may well capture the topological
behavior of some strongly correlated systems. In this work we give a full
pedagogical treatment of a special simple case of these models, which we call
the 3D semion model: We calculate its ground state degeneracies for a variety
of boundary conditions, and classify its low-lying excitations. While point
defects in the bulk are confined in pairs connected by energetic strings, the
surface excitations are more interesting: the model has deconfined point
defects pinned to the boundary of the lattice, and these exhibit semionic
braiding statistics. The surface physics is reminiscent of a $\nu=1/2$ bosonic
fractional quantum Hall effect in its topological limit, and these
considerations help motivate an effective field theoretic description for the
lattice models as variants of $bF$ theories. Our special example of the 3D
semion model captures much of the behavior of more general `confined
Walker-Wang models'. We contrast the 3D semion model with the closely related
3D version of the toric code (a lattice gauge theory) which has deconfined
point excitations in the bulk and we discuss how more general models may have
some confined and some deconfined excitations. Having seen that there exist
lattice models whose surfaces have the same topological order as a bosonic
fractional quantum Hall effect on a confining bulk, we construct a lattice
model whose surface has similar topological order to a fermionic quantum hall
effect. We find that in these models a fermion is always deconfined in the
three dimensional bulk.
