The Prison Induction Haircut

Tiffany Mitchell was, by far, the most feared of the guards at the LockUpCorp Women’s Prison in Midway City.

She wasn’t particularly imposing physically, she was 28 years old, stood at 5’3″ and couldn’t have been more than 120 lbs. even with her uniform on, but any prisoner, regardless of her stature, was afraid of being left alone with Tiffany in this one particular room- the prison barber shop.

Tiffany was the ultimate bully. Sure, LockUpCorp might be the only employer in a 50 mile radius that would pay someone with her education and background a decent wage, but she would work here if they paid the minimum. What she really got out of the job was power it gave her over others. Like any good bully, she had a group of loyal followers enabling her and egging her on. That’s who she had requested to work with today. There was a special inmate coming in, and Tiffany had called in a favor from the warden to schedule it so that Tiffany and her four most loyal sycophants, Officers Tasha Anderson, Valerie Garcia, Kelsey Novak and Sophia Petersen, were the guards assigned to cover the intake that day.

Tiffany was waiting in the barber shop when Valerie and Tasha arrived, carrying in the struggling prisoner, hands cuffed behind her back. The group had all been warned about this particular prisoner: Kira Jones, Age 26, convicted of fraud, theft, false imprisonment, possession of marijuana, and impersonating a law enforcement officer. She had previously been able to escape capture on multiple occasions by tricking her captors. Exactly the kind of arrogant, college-educated, too-good-for-prison bitch that Tiffany and her gang loved to break. Corporate had made them all sit through a boring PowerPoint presentation about the protocol for such a situation. She might have fooled those dumb, horny men at the county jail, but she wasn’t escaping anywhere this time.

“What have we here?” Tiffany laughed menacingly as the new prisoner was brought into the barber shop.

Miss Jones didn’t look anywhere nearly as glamorous as she had on the news. The cocky smirk from her mugshots looked more like a fearful whimper, and whoever listed her at 5’8″ was clearly the victim of one of her cons, but she had the one thing Tiffany wanted: her beautiful ginger locks. It hung down past her shoulders, tangled a bit by the fact that she’d been restrained, but unmistakable nonetheless. Tiffany noticed the tape over the prisoner’s mouth.

“What’s with the…” she asked, pointing at the tape.

“Ha!” Valerie rolled her eyes sarcastically “She’s claiming it’s a case of mistaken identity. Never heard that one before.”

Tiffany ripped the tape off.

“Please help me, you’ve got the wrong person, my name is Alli…” Tiffany put the tape back.

“Nope, that’s staying on.” Tiffany quipped. “Thought you were some kind of master of social engineering and that’s the best con you can come up with. No wonder you got caught. Well, now it’s time for your intake haircut, and since you were soooo polite to my colleagues, I’m going to give you a very stylish haircut we call the ‘Mitchell special'”.

Valerie and Tasha undid her handcuffs and placed a pair on each of her wrists, securing each to the arm of a barber chair. They used another set of cuffs to secure the prisoner’s legs.

“There, she ain’t goin anywhere.” they laughed as their once-glamorous prisoner acquiesced and slouched in the chair.

Tiffany’s dirty blonde hair had been in a tight bun, but as the first part of her routine, she untied the bun and let fall her 3 and a half foot long ponytail. Tasha and Valerie did the same. In the seven years Tiffany Mitchell had worked as a guard in this prison, she’d been continuing to grow it longer, and she loved to flaunt it while she took prisoners’ hair away. She threw a cape over the prisoner and picked up a pair of scissors. Inspecting the scissors closely, she then put them back on the counter.

“Won’t be needing those.” she put the scissors back and picked up something else. It was a large, menacing set of clippers, with no guard on the blades. Tiffany turned the chair around so that the prisoner, formerly the infamous redheaded con woman Kira Jones, now known as inmate 01853496, could either see herself in the mirror or close her eyes, and chose to do the latter. The sound of the clippers as they turned on was deafening. With a quick flick of her wrist, Tiffany tied the prisoner’s hair into a ponytail, then pushed the roaring clippers straight down the middle, then worked her way around the scalp in a circle, separating the hair as close to the scalp as possible. It was something she had done hundreds of times, and it never got any less satisfying.

The prisoner opened her eyes.

All her hair was completely gone. Well, it wasn’t gone, Tiffany was holding it, like a trophy, while her own blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders down to her hip. Tasha and Valerie huddled around her as well, and each of them had let their waist-length hair down. Valerie actually hated having to maintain such long hair. She missed the easy-to-maintain pixie cut she had when she started working here, but the last thing she wanted to do was upset Tiffany by being the only one of her crew who didn’t commit to the bit by growing her hair ultra-long.

“Shocking?” Tiffany taunted “Yeah your new look might take some getting used to. Oh wow, would ya look at that, you are a real redhead. Down to the roots. Well, fortunately we’re not done yet.”

“The Mitchell Special” was a term the inmates had coined for the haircut that Tiffany Mitchell loved to give out: a complete razor head shave, eyebrows included. At first it was a tactic she used to discipline the most out-of-control inmates who were going to get thrown in solitary anyway, but over time, she had expanded the use of the punishment to those caught with contraband, or fighting, regardless of who started the fight. Some of the smarter inmates had realized that if they really needed a favor from the guards and weren’t too attached to their own hair, they could start a fight with whichever inmate was unfortunate enough to have the prettiest hair.

Tasha had already prepared a cart for Tiffany’s next round of supplies: a bowl of water, a towel, a can of shaving cream and a razor. Tiffany wet the prisoner’s scalp and spread shaving cream over it, acting as if she was done, then spreading more over the eyebrows. She then scraped the razor back and forth impatiently until every last bit of of red stubble had been obliterated.

Just as she was finishing, the door burst open. It was Warden Johnson, along with Sophia and Kelsey. They were holding a redhead in civilian clothes, who had her hands and wrists cuffed.

“We caught miss Jones here just as she was getting to the parking lot…” He paused when he saw the bald, browless girl sitting caped in the chair with tape over her mouth. “Uhh… I thought you said you were closing down the barber shop this morning, who is that?” he asked.

Just then, the bald prisoner managed to get the tape off her mouth “Mr. Johnson! Please! I’m Allison Murphy from LockUpCorp IT, I think there has been some kind of mistake, please…”

The warden remembered Allison from the many times she had been sent to fix the printer in the main office, except he remembered her as a redhead, then he saw the red ponytail sitting on the counter.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?”

The new prisoner in street clothes, the real Kira Jones, fell on the floor laughing.

2 Hours later.

Tiffany, Valerie, Tasha, Sophia and Kelsey sat in silence in the warden’s office, each fidgeting with their long hair as they contemplated the role they played, and the blame they would take, in today’s fuckup. The warden had been in and out, barging in occasionally to gather details and then leave again, instructing them all to not say a word to each other, and stationing another guard in the room to make sure they followed through on that instruction. From the information that had trickled in, they learned that an associate of Miss Jones had use voice replicating software to fake a call to Allison from IT, who just happened to look a lot like her, impersonating her boss, and giving her instructions to go to a part of the prison where the inmate had been left alone by Kelsey and Sophia, who also received fake calls and stepped away. Then she switched clothes with the IT girl and was about to steal her car, but the guard in the parking lot noticed she was 5 inches taller and had a different face, and apprehended her.

The warden returned, placing his laptop on his desk and slumping in his chair. He did not look like a man who was having a good day, or even remembered what a good day felt like.

“I just got off a call with the CEO. He’s driving here from HQ. ETA is 2:45.”

Each of the guards’ shoulders sunk. If the CEO had driven in from 2 hours away because of this incident, they would be fired for sure. Each of them knew that losing this job would mean either leaving their hometown or accepting a drastic downgrade in lifestyle. The town had been build around a now-shuttered factory, most of the small businesses in town went bankrupt when a Wal Mart opened up the next town over, and the prison was the only decent-paying job a woman could get without a highly-specialized degree or connections with local politicians.

“Well, there is good news” The warden continued “If you all cooperate, nobody is getting fired, not even me somehow. The bad news. Well he wants me to read this message to you so you hear it verbatim.”

The warden opened his texts and began to read out loud.

“What happened today was a mind-boggling display of idiocy that would have been easily stopped if one single guard on duty had a single functioning brain cell. I don’t know what kind of sick games your guards have been playing in the barber shop and frankly, I don’t care. In fact, I commend their initiative to save money on shampoo. That poor IT girl made a mistake and paid the price, and I think it’s only fair that everyone involved pays the same price. So I’ll let them keep their jobs under two conditions. First, they sign an NDA, that’s why I’m heading over with a couple of the boys from legal. Second, that everyone involved in this near catastrophe goes and gives themselves the same haircut the IT girl got. When I get there, I want to see every guard who let this happen in the conference room, and I better not see one single hair on any of their heads, or they’re all fired, for cause, without severance, and I will personally make damn sure that not a single person here will give you a good reference.”

He paused while they processed that.

“It’s 2:31. Probably want to head to the barber shop if you want to keep working here.”

The girls quickly made their way to the barber shop. Sophia tried to quit, explaining that she would just get a job at her aunt and uncle’s restaurant as a waitress. While the others had grown their hair long at Tiffany’s behest, Sophia’s blonde hair had already hung to her waist before she started working here. Now it fell almost to her knees when she let it all the way down. It was her boyfriend’s favorite feature. Valerie, Tasha and Kelsey gave her an understanding nod, but Tiffany grabbed her arm and gave an utter look of disdain that made Sophia change her mind and reluctantly follow her colleagues to the prison barber shop. When they arrived, they noticed that another long, red ponytail sat on the counter next to the one Tiffany had separated from the head of Allison from IT.

Valerie wasted no time grabbing the clippers off the counter and plunging them right down the middle of her 4 foot long hair. To her, this ultimatum came as a relief. She would rather be bald than keep having to spend as much time as she did having to maintain this monstrosity of thick, black hair anyway. Unfortunately, it was so thick that the clippers immediately jammed and got tangled.

“Give me that!” Tiffany grabbed the clippers. They were still hot from collecting that second head of hair. She grabbed the rest of Valerie’s hair and worked the clippers through it, quickly, but patiently enough not to jam or overheat, until all that was left was stubble, passing the clippers quickly over each eyebrow and throwing the massive pile of beautifully maintained hair on the ground unceremoniously. Kelsey had gathered her 3 and a half foot brown locks into a ponytail and moved into place to sacrifice her locks to the clippers.

Meanwhile, Valerie dug through the drawers for razors and realized they were only two left, and they were the flimsy, cheap disposables. Before anyone else could find out, she ran her head under the sink, spread some shaving foam over it and started shaving away. The last remains of her hair were doing their best to fight the razor, but slowly and surely, it won.

Kelsey stumbled over, nearly bald and holding back tears. She was so used to the weight of her absurdly long hair that it was almost hard to balance without it. She looked in the drawer and picked up the last razor.

“Is this all of them?” She asked Valerie

“I think so. We’ll have to share so be quick” Valerie answered as she closed her eyes to shave off her eyebrows.

Tasha was next in line for the clippers. She had been nervously braiding her long, curly hair into an elaborate design while they had waited in the warden’s office, and it fell to the ground in one piece like a tapestry as Tiffany’s skilled work left behind nothing longer than faint stubble.

Tasha walked over to where Valerie and Kelsey were scraping the foam off their scalps, rinsed her hair and covered it in shaving cream. “Where did you get the razors?”

“Uhh… I don’t think there are any more new ones, but since you’re going to have to reuse one anyway, there’s one over there” Kelsey said sheepishly, but there is one on the counter over there. She pointed to the disposable razor next to the two ginger ponytails, covered in shaving cream and tiny red hairs. Tasha picked it up and looked at it, a little grossed out.

Meanwhile, Sophia was having second thoughts again. She clutched her butt-length blonde hair

“You know, it’s ok, I don’t really need this job. I think I want to just work at my family’s restaurant and maybe go back to school and…”

Tasha, a cap of white foam over her scalp and eyebrows, grabbed Sophia by the ponytail and pulled her back. She took the clippers from Tiffany’s hand and pushed them through the middle of Sophia’s blonde hair, leaving behind only invisible stubble as four foot strands fell to the floor.

“We’re in this together. You too Tiff” She turned to Tiffany and pushed the clippers through the middle of her hair too “Clock’s running, tick tock!” She glared at both of them, then rinsed off the used razor and started shaving herself with it, frustrated by the bluntness of the blade but persisting nonetheless.

Tiffany realized she didn’t want to risk being the last one with hair when the CEO arrived and took the clippers to herself. The long, blonde strands she had so many times used to taunt the unfortunate inmates now fell to the floor, mixing in with the other discarded hair and leaving behind dark stubble that betrayed the fact that she had never been a natural blonde. She finished, then handed the clippers to Sophia, leaving her on her own. Only when she realized that there were no more razors for herself did she turn around to help Sophia, who had already gotten the clippers stuck. Grabbing Sophia’s head, she steadied the clippers and helped rid her of the long, naturally blonde locks she treasured so much.

Now Tiffany and Sophia’s hair and eyebrows were nothing but faint stubble, but they had to wait for a razor. It was 2:37. Frustrated with Tasha’s progress, Tiffany grabbed her razor.

“Let me do it!” She commanded, and began shaving the rest of Tasha’s stubble in a much faster and less gentle way than she had been treating her own scalp. In a couple minutes, it was gone, and Tiffany ran her own head under the sink and spread shaving foam over it. Even though the razor had been blunted by its prior use, she shaved herself with such determination that she finished her entire head at the same time as Valerie and Kelsey.

It was 2:42 and Sophia still had a head covered in stubble. Tiffany grabbed her, shoved her head under the sink, wet her scalp and spread shaving foam.

“Ok quick, everyone, just take a section, go quick, we’re all in this together.”

Tiffany, Kelsey and Valerie teamed up on the remains of Sophia’s beautiful blonde hair while Tasha held her head still, each slashing wildly with the dull, dirty razors until there was nothing on Sophia’s head except a couple nicks from the razors, and they finished with a minute to spare.

They raced to the conference room. 15 minutes ago, each had their own style, but now, in matching uniforms, they were distinguishable only by slight differences in body shape and skin tone. The warden was waiting for them, with two lawyers and a stack of papers.

“The CEO is on a call with the board and should be in shortly, please have a seat” instructed one of the lawyers. “There are two forms we are asking you to sign. The first is a non-disclosure issue. You will agree not to speak to anyone about today’s incident, or face severe financial penalties. Second, we have an amendment to your employment contracts. Each of you will agree that, as part of your dress code, you will maintain your current hair styles, and submit to a weekly inspection by the warden to insure compliance.”