Barber school offers inmates chance to leave prison with more than a rap sheet
By Josh Shaffer
News & Observer
LILLINGTON, N.C. — A guard stands watch as Darryl Simpson lathers a tattooed neck and drags a straight razor over the dark Chinese characters, practicing the perfect shave. There’s no blade in the razor. Simpson hasn’t even touched scissors yet. He’s a convicted felon serving 17 years for second-degree murder, having beaten a Fayetteville man to death with a 4-foot board.
All 20 men in this mock barbershop wear crisp black smocks and polite smiles. It’s easy to imagine them draping customers, trimming sideburns and beards, making chit-chat about boxing and politics. But these men also carry memories of robberies and drug deals gone bad, along with a hope that scissors and shears will move them past guns, robbery and cocaine.
Here, in an old brick maintenance building, Harnett Correctional Institution has started the state’s only shave-and-a-haircut school -- a program so popular that convicts from other prisons already want slots in the shiny new barber chairs.
It’s not easy time. Classes run eight hours a day, five days a week, starting at 7:30 a.m. But it’s a shot at a new life for convicts like Simpson. In a few years, he will pass through the metal gates on East McNeill Street with nothing but a murder record and a barber’s certificate. He hopes the certificate means more.
“I know it will,” said Simpson, 39, with a smile. “I’ve always been a shade-tree barber.”
Job training for inmates is nothing new. But barbering sends ex-cons into the world with a durable skill for a shaky economy.
Harnett’s prison releases about 97 men each day. Turn them loose as barbers, and they might not come back.
“Barbering is one of those jobs that’s kind of recession-proof,” said Bill Tyson, a provost at Central Carolina Community College, which provides an instructor. “Everybody has to look good at some time.”
But it’s still a gamble.
Roughly half of North Carolina prisoners released in fiscal 2004 were re-arrested within three years, according to a state advisory commission’s report.
But even if they go straight, these inmates will face skepticism -- if not outright rejection.
Carlton Nicholson has run a downtown Raleigh barber shop for decades. He waves out the window at anyone who catches his eye.
But a felon applying for a job?
“They might be all right,” Nicholson said, counting up his cash register, “and they might pretend to be all right.”
A job with honor
Every morning, the 20 inmates file into the old brick maintenance building made over as a barber shop. Inmates in the carpentry shop made all the cabinets. Inside the drawers, you can see the scissors and electric shavers sunk inside a sheet of foam rubber that is inventoried before and after class -- insurance that no tool follows the inmates out the door.
Every student has earned at least a GED. No one convicted of first-degree murder, rape or another sex offense need apply, as it’s unlikely employers would see past the most heinous offenses.
“Chances are, they’re not going to be barbers,” said Tresa Tomlinson, the prison’s assistant superintendent for programs.
While the inmates practice, instructor Michael Cheek hammers them with one mantra: “This is an honorable profession.”
They believe it.
Behind bars, prisoners describe their futures in rosy terms. They picture their own shops with the certainty of fresh-faced graduates, diplomas in hand.
But these barbers in training know the stigma that awaits them on the outside.
A few chairs down from Simpson, Brian Henderson flicks his blade-free razor over a fellow inmate’s chin.
His convictions follow a long, violent trail: arson, armed robbery, breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
Staff researcher Lamara Williams contributed to this report.