10/11/2008

By JOSH SHAFFER  / Associated Press

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 chitchat 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.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that 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."

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.

Behind bars, he studies the history of barbering, the complexities of skin texture, the best way to match a hairstyle to the contours of a face.

Henderson speaks with the optimism of someone who sleeps on a bunk bed in a roomful of felons, where a man can only hope. "A lot of people will be reluctant to hire us," said Henderson, 31. "But this is like securing our future. There's no way we can fail. Barbers, they'll always be in demand."

The men speak in polite, professional tones, as though they were fresh from finishing school.

Quiet, with shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses, 25-year-old Keith Muse sounds nothing like a man doing time for robbery with a dangerous weapon.

"I've always been the kind of person that likes to keep himself neat and clean," he said, practicing his shave. "I'm interested in everything that involves the personal welfare of the client."

But they struggle with structured, eight-hour days. They describe the difficult transition to textbooks and lab work after a life of crime. Some of them, like Simpson and John Anderson, are more than a decade removed from public school.

Anderson is 36 and lived in Fayetteville before cocaine trafficking sent him to prison. The only barbering experience he had came from shaving his own head.

But as he tried to remake himself in prison, he realized he needed to do more than own up to his mistakes. He needed to find some way to be an asset rather than a liability.

"I have friends who are barbers," he said. "They seem happy. Maybe they've found what I've been missing all these years."

Two chairs down from Anderson, Patrick Monroe wonders the same thing.

Seven years ago, he led police on a 100 mph chase through Hoke and Robeson counties. It started at a high school, and before officers stopped Monroe, with a sawed-off shotgun and crack cocaine in his car, he had struck one of them with the vehicle in a high school parking lot.

Now 30, he pictures himself with his own shop. Maybe he'll call it Monroe's.

He can remember the barbers he knew growing up in Raeford. They had an aura of respectability about them, he said.

Maybe one day, Monroe hopes, a 19-year-old kid will slip into his barber chair, cocky and violent like he was, bound for trouble.

As he lathers his chin for a close shave, maybe Monroe can tell him what it's like to live behind razor wire, to spend nights behind locked gates, to pray for a second chance.

That, he said, would make for a life well-spent.

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Information from: The News & Observer, http://www.newsobserver.com