WLKM Radio 95.9 FM
All of Ken Bennett’s Tuesday morning barbershop customers wear orange jumpsuits.
The owner of the Hair Shed in downtown Battle Creek has spent every Tuesday for the past 20 years cutting the hair of inmates at the Calhoun County jail.
In a one-chair shop deep inside the facility, Bennett trims hair, beards and mustaches and doesn’t talk about crime.
“I have to go on record that I don’t care about these guys about where they have been or what they have done,” Bennett told the Battle Creek Enquirer (http://bcene.ws/1DipM6z ). “There is not a one that I have asked. They are people and I cut hair and that is about the limit of that.
“We can joke and there are a lot of things that we can talk about like the weather and the football game.”
He said over the past 20 years he has cut the hair of people who have done some bad things.
“But for me, it’s just a haircut,” he said.
Each week Bennett, 70, cuts hair for 10 to 20 inmates between 7 and 11 a.m. and is paid $10 for each one. Nearly all inmates pay for their own haircuts although jail officials said prisoners determined as indigent are given a haircut every three months and Bennett is paid by the county.
The price is less than the $19 he charges in his shop but he said because there is always a line he can give four an hour and make some money.
“I have a trapped audience even if I don’t make as much money,” he said.
Originally from Litchfield, Bennett grew up working on a dairy farm and began cutting hair in the Navy more than 50 years ago.
“I joined the Navy out of high school and ended up chipping paint and I didn’t like that so much so I volunteered,” he said. “They told me you put clippers on the side of the head and go up to the top. That is all a Navy haircut is.”
After the Navy, Bennett went to barber college in Detroit and eventually came to a shop owned by Lynn Marshall in Battle Creek.
He has been in different shops and in the present location for 25 to 30 years.
“I like to say I was here before the (downtown pedestrian) mall, during the mall and after the mall,” he said.
He remembers when 15 barbers worked downtown and more than 100 in the greater Battle Creek area. Now he is the only shop downtown and one of about 25 barbers in the city.
About 41 years ago he began cutting hair at Starr Commonwealth, a facility for young offenders in Albion. Then when the new jail was opened in 1995, he started cutting hair there when the barber at the former Marshall jail didn’t want to drive to Battle Creek.
He also does home visits, cuts hair for people in hospitals and an occasional trim for the dead in funeral homes.
Bennett has learned to cut hair for all ethnic inmates and said he seems to get positive recommendations from the jail inmates.
He has cut hair for many inmates who have returned for new sentences and said some want his haircuts just before they are released.
“I think my reputation is pretty good,” and one of his customers, Mohammad Jaber, 28, of Dearborn agrees.
“He is a pro,” Jaber said, after explaining how he wanted his hair.
Bennett brings his own clippers and is not allowed sharp instruments like scissors.
Deputy Stevie Frierson sits in the shop with Bennett and the inmates and said each prisoner can have haircuts about once a month and that includes everyone, no matter why they are in jail.
Bennett some many jails don’t have a barber so sometimes inmates cut hair.
“In Muskegon, a woman truck driver cuts hair whenever she is in town,” he said.
Bennett has no plans to stop cutting hair.
“As long as my health holds up and I can walk around the chair and see what I am doing, I will be like a lot of barbers and die behind my chair,” he said. (AP)
