It’s called Cut-Time Beauty, a decent enough name for a neighborhood salon.
But Cut-Time Beauty is a great name when you consider that it’s on the grounds of the Illinois Youth Center in Warrenville, and it’s there for the correctional facility’s teenage inmates.
Cut-Time Beauty opened for business last month, providing the girls incarcerated at Warrenville access to perms, trims, cuts and shampoos. And more.
“We all know that a lot of girls come in here, they’re beaten down, broken down,” says warden Jeffery Bargar. “This is part of building them back up.”
The immediate goal is to improve a girl’s self-image, he said. A sort of look good/feel good approach.
Long-range, “our vision of this is to have it be a certified [vocational] program so the girls can learn the skills to help them transition into the community,” said assistant warden Margarita Mendoza.
Right now, that’s waiting for state approval and funding. And if that might seem like a pipe dream, look at how far things have come. A little more than a year ago these chairs and sinks were being used by customers at a beauty salon in a strip mall on Illinois Highway 59 in Warrenville.
But then it went out of business. Enter Jerry McGrane.
“Knowing all the guys in the trades, the guys were telling me they were putting an L.A. Tan in and were doing some demolition work,” said McGrane, a correctional maintenance craftsman at IYC-Warrenville.
When he found out the contents of the beauty shop were being tossed, he got in touch with the mall owners. The state couldn’t afford to buy the equipment–about $20,000 worth, down to the Open/Closed sign–so the owners donated it.
“He gets stuff donated all the time,” Mendoza said. “It doesn’t even surprise us anymore. `Of course you got us a beauty shop, Jerry.'”
“I went to the warden and told him. He said, `Jerry, how much is it going to cost me?’ I said, `I don’t think it’ll cost you anything.'”
He was right. The expense was minimal, Bargar said, basically time and labor.
Volunteers and McGrane’s kids picked up the equipment and stored it in a friend’s garage until a former mobile classroom could be converted. Tradesmen from the Illinois Youth Center-St. Charles helped install a 40-gallon hot-water tank, washer and dryer. Add four stations, two sinks, a receptionist’s desk, a pair of comfy couches and a magazine-covered table, and it’s welcome to Cut-Time Beauty. This is a giant leap forward in hair-care history at Warrenville.
“We used to take them to J.C. Penney at the Fox Valley Mall to do their hair,” McGrane said. “Two staff would have to volunteer to take the kids to the mall in their off time.”
His sister, Mary Lee, started coming to the facility to do hair, he said.
“She used to cut their hair in the wood shop, women’s restroom, a locker room. . . . Once a kid cut his own hair [Warrenville used to be co-ed] with a Bic razor. She came in and touched it up.”
No more of that.
“This is really nice. We were in the gym,” said Ruth Sanders–Miss Ruth to the kids–a Chicago beauty shop owner who has been coming out every other week for five years.
“You’d forget about it when you go home, where you were working. Then you come back and walk into the worst working conditions possible.”
The shop handles 20 to 25 customers every Tuesday. As long as they’ve behaved themselves, the 88 inmates are eligible to participate. The rest of the week, volunteers come in and show the girls how to paint their nails, put makeup on properly and take care of their skin.
And while there’s no cosmetology program in place yet, the girls do learn things.
“At least if they’re used to the terminology of the profession and different techniques,” Mendoza said, “when they leave and decide to enroll in school in their community, they’ll know what to expect.”
Brandi (not her real name) has been helping Sanders for about a year, shampooing, sweeping up, keeping the beauty-shop conversation going. Her time at Warrenville is just about up, and she said she might go into some aspect of the business. She agrees that Sanders and others in the program do more than cut hair.
“With all the changes the girls go through, she has patience,” said Brandi, 18, who has been incarcerated since she was 13. “She cares for us and wants to motivate us to go home and get good jobs.”
The kids, Sanders said, “are a joy.”
“I don’t have any kids of my own. Jesus gave me these kids. They’re mine. Some people think they’re the worst in the world. But they’re not. All they want is some love.”
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bhageman@tribune.com
