Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Best face forward A little makeup and hairstyling lift the spirits of women inmates
Does it surprise you to know that women inside our state’s prison system have access to makeup? It’s true most women take a pass, or apply just a bit of mascara or some color on the lips. For others, it’s perhaps the most expensive daily indulgence they budget for (smoking was outlawed in 2000), and it doesn’t come in from outside.
State prisons, like many stand-alone institutions, have commissaries. At Arkansas’ prison stores, inmates can buy Tyson bacon ($3.43), whole mackerel ($2), Rolaids (96 cents), Koss earbuds ($7.34), dominoes ($6), gel insoles ($13.38) and more.
At the women’s units, there’s Lottabody hair-setting lotion ($6.73), perm rollers ($2) and foam rollers ($1.31), Olay face cream ($14.59), Maybelline Dream Smooth Mousse blush ($7.94), mirrors ($2.38), emery boards (88 cents), plastic tweezers ($1.20), Royal Crown hair dressing ($2.24), Wet & Wild eye shadow ($8.54) and Maybelline Baby Lips gloss ($3.40).
The women in the Mcpherson Unit in Newport and the medium-security Hawkins Unit in Wrightsville live behind layers of locked gates, reinforced glass and concertina wire. Not even sunlight gets far into the barracks, where harsh fluorescent lights and storm cloudcolored concrete create a kind of unsaturated tableau.
The women look like factory workers from a dystopian future in their plain white pants and smocks. White undergarments only. No cuff rolling. In white Nikes they squeak around the concrete hallways. Or, if they’re in Mcpherson, the edges of the hallways — solid yellow lanes keep the middle clear for administration.
If the women could snap their fingers and manifest an accessory, any bit of
fashion at all, they’d choose color, they said.
Many, like Rachel West of Hawkins and Beverly Latiker of Mcpherson, luxuriate in their makeup.
“I’ve been here 29 years,” Latiker says. “These are the things you do every day because you’re a woman.”
Latiker is serving a life sentence for murder. Inside, she’s something like a Resident Adviser in a dorm, but in such a closed society, she is much more influential. She sleeps among the new inmates, offers counsel, comfort. She models behavior.
“You see over time that the women do look at other women that take care of themselves,” West says. “And you’ll see those that don’t do anything with themselves — lay in bed, don’t do anything — start wearing a little bit of makeup and start feeling better about themselves.”
For the most part, these women didn’t leave behind fastidious beauty routines. Many of the inmates come straight from abusive households and lifestyles, West says — drug addictions that devoured their money and their looks.
Crystal Radford, 31, who recently completed the cosmetology course at Mcpherson, was raised a ward of the state.
“I wasn’t around any role models. Before I went into cosmetology, I didn’t wear no makeup.”
Radford has a little over a year to go in a 15-year sentence for kidnapping before she’ll be eligible for parole.
GIRLS DOIN’ HAIR
Inside one of the Hawkins’ barracks, separated from the others by a wall of windows and cinder blocks, Paulette Coleman, 26, curls 30-yearold Latasha Poney’s hair. It’s an intricate styling because Poney’s hair is fine and only 2 inches long. Both women are serving sentences for seconddegree murder.
“She’s gorgeous. She can really do great hair,” Poney says of Coleman.
Those of you who have read this far may be asking, What do they have to look pretty for? There’s no nightlife, no men and no dinnerand-a-movie dates.
Here’s something women, inmate or “free world” — West’s phrase — know that men don’t. Women don’t endeavor to be fashionable for guys. They do it for other women.
West, 38, who was convicted of two counts of aggravated robbery, could leave Hawkins as early as this summer. She was 22 when she arrived — roomy bluejeans were still in style, plaid jackets, and the Jennifer Aniston bob was big.
“I’ve been so many years locked up, I don’t even know what’s out there,” West says. “I have no idea what I even like.”
She’s pretty meticulous about her short hairstyle with little tapered pin curls. She’s carefully trimmed her eyebrows; her lipstick, foundation, mascara, eye shadow and eyeliner are conservative. She’ll fit in.
If Poney weren’t inside — oooh! — she would be all about hair extensions and big earrings. “Earrings really bring out your face,” she says, and why again can’t we have stud earrings? She asks Capt. Peggy Benish.
No necklaces, bracelets, anklets, earrings or body piercings. Inmates may have a single gemstone-less wedding band and a religious medallion (hung from their ID chains).
No long hair or hair coifed into a pouf of any kind. Both make excellent nests for contraband. White inmates can wear their hair to their shoulders if untreated, but black inmates cannot grow their hair out without also straightening it.
No long fingernails that could cut or dig in a fight. Not even fake fingernails airbrushed with American flags or the scales of justice.
No hair dye. Such a change would significantly alter their appearance. Call it recently released New Multitudes (Rounder), in which an Americana group comprised of singer- songwriters Jay Farrar (Son Volt), Jim James ( My Morning Jacket), Anders Parker (Varnaline) and Will Johnson (Centro-matic) mined the Guthrie archive for lyrics they could set to music.
Billy Bragg’s similar collaboration with Wilco has so far produced three Mermaid Avenue albums. A four-disc set, Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions is to be released by Nonesuch on April 21. Mermaid Avenue was the Coney Island street where Guthrie and his family lived in the 1950s and ’60s.
Farrar — once Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s partner in Uncle Tupelo — was among the handful of musicians Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter and the keeper of his archive, contacted back in 1992 when she decided to allow select artists access to the archive.
(In Bob Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles, he contends that while visiting Guthrie in the New Jersey hospital where he was confined after contracting Huntington’s disease, his idol gave him permission to look through his cache of thousands of unpublished lyrics. Dylan immediately took a train to Coney Island, but when he arrived at the Mermaid Avenue house, he was met by Guthrie’s young son Arlo and a baby sitter. Arlo wouldn’t let him past the front door, so Dylan left empty-handed.)
After hearing the English folksinger Bragg play at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert, Nora allowed him to rummage through boxes of the material, looking for lyrics to set to music. With the help of Tweedy and Jay Bennett (who died in 2009), Bragg proceeded to write and record dozens of songs.
Still, there’s something dubious about this sort of collaboration with dead artists. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, writing about soprano saxophonist Kenny G’s ill-advised decision to overdub himself on Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” came up with the memorable term The Fugitive rule.
No vials or bottles of perfume, because anything with alcohol could conceivably be made into “hooch,” and besides, perfume is flammable.
Now, just because the women can’t have perfume doesn’t mean they don’t wear perfume. Fashion magazines are hot items for the cologne ads. Latiker says you can take these scented pages and tear then up into tiny bits, even grind them up, then mix them with baby powder.
When inmates pass around beauty secrets, often, they are beauty secrets.
For instance, the institution provides all inmates with Maximum Security brand toothpaste if they can’t afford to buy Colgate. ( Because it hasn’t a “free world” analog, it seems a salty job of branding, “Maximum Security.”) Mixed with a little water, it makes an excellent soft-hold hair sculpting liquid.
A stronger hold? A Jolly Rancher dissolved in water.
Eyeliner? Take a pencil, grind it on some concrete or cinder block, dab your finger first in water then the poultice, and apply.
Mascara? Vaseline and some black ink.
Lipstick? A Skittle works surprisingly well.
Press powder? Instant coffee plus baby powder.
Inmates often can’t afford the products in the commissary. Except for work-release inmates, no Arkansas inmate can earn money inside. Purchases at the commissaries are made from institutional debit accounts funded by family or friends. Makeup is not an item that can be sent to an inmate or given during visitation.
Shawn Jimenez, who’s a Christian outreach counselor inside Mcpherson, says she’s fixed up other inmates for church from her own stock, if they ask her.
Jimenez, a former drug dealer and prostitute serving a 30-year sentence for trying to hire a hit man to kill two police officers, says she accepted a decade ago “that this was going to be my home, and I wasn’t going to let myself go because then the time goes real hard.” “musical necrophilia.”
By and large the music on the Mermaid Avenue sets and New Multitudes succeeds because the living collaborators don’t seem overly concerned with creating a Guthrie-esque melody or even retrofitting the words to the time of their creation. Instead they made the wonderful — and probably dead-on — assumption that since Guthrie was a rock ’n’ roll progenitor, his lyrics would translate naturally to post-elvis Presley treatments.
So what we have is not just Guthrie embellished or made accessible, but a kind of revitalized Guthrie. Instead of his raw and rough-hewn melodies, which were at best effective in a sing-song nursery rhyme way (the greatest virtue of “This Land Is Your Land” is that anyone can sing the melody), his port-mortem co-writers manage to emphasize Guthrie’s songwriting strengths while adding musical textures and dynamics.
Like every great pop lyricist, from Cole Porter to Paul Simon, Guthrie had a gift for moving from the highly personal to the universal. In the best of these collaborations, his DNA combines with the new blood to make some darling mutants. E-mail: