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The Catch-22 of a Prison Sentence

By Jeralyn, Section Inmates and Prisons
Posted on Fri Mar 04, 2005 at 12:31:36 PM EST
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Imagine going to prison for 11 years, and while there, taking courses, learning a trade and excelling at it. You should be a shoo-in for getting a new start of life as a law-abiding citizen when you get out. Not in New York, not if you want to be a hairstylist and have been to prison.

Mr. [Marc] La Cloche served 11 years in New York prisons for first-degree robbery. While behind bars, he turned his life around. He learned a trade, barbering. He even had the image of a barber's clippers and comb tattooed on his right arm.

In 2000, as he prepared to be freed, he applied for a required state license. He was denied it. But that decision was reversed when reviewed by a hearing officer. For a while after his release, Mr. La Cloche worked in a Midtown barber shop. That job did not last long.

New York's secretary of state, who has jurisdiction in these matters, appealed the granting of the license and won. Mr. La Cloche's "criminal history," an administrative law judge ruled, "indicates a lack of good moral character and trustworthiness required for licensure." In plain language, the fact that Mr. La Cloche had been in prison proved that he was unworthy for the trade that the state itself taught him in prison.

Where is Joseph Heller when we need him?

A judge finally ordered the state to reconsider Mr. La Cloche's fitness for a license. He was denied again as being morally unfit to cut hair because of his crime.

He is now on public assistance, he says, and receives disability payments for a bad hip. Apparently, state officials believe that New Yorkers are better served having a former convict on welfare rather than in a career. One of his plans were he to get a license, Mr. La Cloche said, would be to team with "a bunch of barbers" to cut the hair of young people living in state institutions.

"What I really want is to have this contact with these kids so I can hopefully get to them and change their life around," he said. "I was raised in these institutions. But this barber license is really holding me up."

La Cloche is still fighting for his license with the assistance of a pro bono lawyer. He is not alone, according to the Joanne Page, the executive director of the Fortune Society, which helps ex-offenders.

It is one thing to prevent, say, a child molester from driving a school bus, she said. But to keep a convicted robber from cutting hair? The authorities, she pointed out, trusted Mr. La Cloche enough to wield sharp instruments in a maximum-security prison.

Stupid is as stupid does,