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‘When you look good, you feel good.’ State offering classes to help youths in state prison work toward barber, cosmetology licenses

Jovan Curry washed the hair of a teenage detainee after she chopped off his long dreadlocks, which lay on the floor under a black leather barber’s chair.

The teenager closed his eyes and relaxed while a group of other young teens stood around Curry as she instructed them on proper hair-washing techniques.

“Make sure to rinse all the shampoo out of the client’s hair,” Curry told the boys. “The client probably hasn’t had a good shampoo in months because he did just release his dreads.”

The teenagers, who are in custody at the state’s youth prison in Chicago, are participating in the state’s first accredited barber program for juvenile detainees. The youths are earning credit hours to obtain a barber or cosmetology license through the program given at the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice’s Warrenville and Chicago facilities.

Curry, the school’s instructor, moved her hands across the teenager’s scalp, asking the teens around her to name the bone structure as she shampooed during class Wednesday morning. She massaged the occipital, or back of the head, and then asked, “Once we hit the sides, we hit what?”

“The temporal,” one teen called out.

The Department of Juvenile Justice started the program in January and is holding an event Thursday to mark the grand opening of the prison barber school. The program is funded by a grant from the Illinois State Board of Education, according to Michael Byrd, assistant superintendent of programs at the youth center in Chicago.

The barber school is part of a push by the department to provide postsecondary educational opportunities for detainees who have received their GED or completed high school.

“We managed to get the youth graduated from high school in our facility. We hadn’t had that in the past,” Byrd said. “Once that started, we weren’t prepared enough and had to get ahead of it.”

So in recent years, the youth center began offering some opportunities, including courses for college credit, Byrd said. Some detainees began asking about a chance to learn to cut hair, he said.

They explored options for barber programs and partnered with Larry’s Barber College, which has schools in Illinois and Texas, including two on the South Side and one in the Cook County Jail.

The youth center in Chicago houses a barber college, and the Warrenville facility, which is coed has a barber and cosmetology program, according to Byrd. The state’s Department of Juvenile Justice houses juveniles whose cases have been adjudicated.

At the Illinois Youth Center in Chicago, at 136 N. Western Ave., staff members cleared out a room that had previously been used as storage. They painted the walls, and added a blue and red swirl to a support pole in the middle of the room to look like a traditional barbershop.

The room has four shampoo stations and six hair-cutting stations with mirrors, chairs and tables outfitted with blow-dryers, capes and other equipment. They don’t have a plumbing system for the shampoo stations, so Curry and the teens use water bottles to wet the hair of the people having their hair done. The water from the sink is connected to a bucket by a hose.

In the middle of the room, traditional classroom desks sit in front of a white board, with anatomical terms scrawled in marker.

The detainees come three days a week. They practice on each other, on other boys housed in the facility and on staff members. Seven detainees are participating after applying for the program.

One boy trimmed Byrd’s beard with an electric razor during class.

“You gotta pull his collar out,” Curry called to the boy, who readjusted the superintendent’s collar as he removed the protective cape.

Some of the teens in the program see it as a career when they are released and others look at it as a possible side job. One has thought about being a barber since he was a young boy because he hated when his uncle would cut his hair.

“He would make me all bald,” the teen said while taking a break from class.

When he was around 12 years old, he went to a real barber for the first time and wanted to learn how to do it himself.

Curry said she has seen a change in the boys in the weeks since the program started. She decided to put the boys who tended to be bullies in leadership positions. She put the boy who cussed the most in charge of conduct.

“You’re going to tell everyone else to stop cussing,” she said she told him.

She uses word associations and other memory tricks to help them with the anatomy portion of the course. Soon, they will start chemistry, learning about pH levels.

“When you look good, you feel good. That’s how I want you to feel,” Curry said she tells them as she washes and grooms their hair.

After she washed the hair of the teenager who used to have the dreadlocks, she led him to a barber chair and used a razor to buzz his hair into a short cut. The teen said he had wanted a change in hairstyle.

He swept his dreadlocks into a plastic bag and rubbed his hand over his head.

“I like it,” he said.

mabuckley@chicagotribune.com