LAPEER, MI — It is 9 a.m. on Independence Day and Jessica Lewis is driving to jail.

She is headed out of town and the urban surroundings are giving way to a rural landscape. This, she says, is when the creepiness begins to set in.

"What a great way to celebrate the Fourth, right?" she says.

She makes this trip about twice a month. It's becoming familiar. Jail is a place where anything resembling an ordinary life must be imitated, manufactured or imported.

Today's import is haircuts. Lewis is the supplier.

She works in a regular salon all week, but is on the lookout for what she calls "income boosters" whenever money gets tight. She's a single mom of a teenager, and wants to send her daughter on a trip abroad that will cost about $4,000. Her car insurance recently went up, costing more than the payment, and the rear of that same car is rattling in ways that frighten her.

She's done lots of things for extra money, writing for websites and managing social media accounts among them. She's done the hair and makeup of corpses at funeral homes. None of those gigs lasted. She gets burned out quickly and wants to do new things. She also gets burned out doing hair — at the salon and occasionally out of her home — but she plans on staying at the jail as long as they'll have her.

"So many people are asking me about it. They're like, what the heck, are you crazy? Most people think I'm crazy," she said.

It was a job no one else wanted, but one she finds fascinating. She heard about it from a former inmate who came to her salon. He was sitting in her boss' chair, talking about how he hadn't had a haircut in five months. The jail couldn't find a barber. It was easy to see why.

The last one had fallen in love with an inmate, the former inmate said, and once the inmate was released she left her husband and kids for him.

A week later, she called the jail, and told the person who answered she understood they were looking for someone who could cut hair.

She got an interview. They conducted a background check. Then a guard told her the same story the man at the beauty shop had about the last barber.

She was scared her first day, she said. She was set up in the visitation room, where one wall was lined with two-way phones, stainless steel stools and thick glass.

There was also the smell.

"It smells like hell in there. Just sweaty, funky, like the inside of a boy's hat. Just like depression. Like deep, dark depression," she said.

The first time she cut an inmate's hair ,there was something bothering her, but it wasn't the inmate. It was the guard standing behind her, looming. Lewis can't stand having anyone look over her shoulder, and it didn't help that he had a gun. Lewis was brought up in a home where even squirt guns were not allowed.

She asked him to leave.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"You just have to leave," she told him. "I got this. I'm fine."

The guard left, and Lewis became more conscious of the dustpan she has to flip over and wedge under the door to keep it open. If someone kicked it out and the door shut, it would, like all the doors in jail, be locked until she hit a button to summon a deputy who would open the door with the harsh tell-tale buzz.

There were 23 haircuts that first day, one right after the other. There would have been more but her clippers were getting so hot from constant use they were burning her hand and she had to stop. She came back three days later to finish the job and has been on call ever since, coming in about every two weeks.

She's starting to feel more comfortable, but not too comfortable. She recently started taking martial arts classes, learning the proper ways to grapple and apply a choke, but she hasn't been in a while -- money's still tight.

It's still scary, but there's something about it that doesn't exist at her day job. Her customers say thank you, every one. No one yells at her. She has not been sexually harassed once — a daily occurrence, she said, at her regular job.

She chats easily with most inmates. Even though they often tell her, she doesn't want to know what they've done. It's hard to keep an open mind between the person on trial for attempted manslaughter and the guy who wrote some bad checks. Not knowing makes it easier to treat the inmates like anyone else, it makes this "income booster" easier to do, and it makes it possible for the inmates to get something as simple as a haircut.

Besides, in her time there, the line between the inside and outside world has blurred.

The jail is perhaps just as scary, but it might only be as scary as the outside world.

"But what if?" her friends and family often ask her, not having to finish the question. She's getting tired of it.

"There are just as many creepy people in your everyday life. They just haven't gotten caught yet, they haven't snapped yet, whatever. And I don't want to live like that — what if?"

When she arrives at the jail on the Fourth, she awaits the deputy, then follows him through the first locked door before walking to the next one herself, putting her hand on the knob, waiting for the buzz.

Inside

Lapeer County Jail is a plain, one-story brick building. On the Fourth of July, there were 113 inmates inside, with offenses ranging from driving with a suspended license to attempted murder. Criminal sexual conduct charges are common. A prison is next door, and deputies say that's the place you'd rather be. You have more freedom in prison. You get to go outside. Some inmates sit in Lapeer County for as much as two years before they find out where they're headed next.

"They come to us before they go to anyone else," says Deputy Joe Davis.

There are different pods for different people. There are areas for people getting detoxed, areas with higher security, a special area for "trustees" — inmates with lesser offenses who can get time off for working for the jail. There's a special area for women, but Lewis never sees them. Only the men are interested in getting their hair cut.

All of this is visible from the jail's control rooms, areas where Led Zepplin softly plays on a radio, and handcuffs, chains, Tasers and bags of sunflower seeds sit out at the ready.

There are quiet days, long stretches where there are no incidents, that the deputies try not to mention, hoping not to jinx the good luck. Then there are other stretches — deputies remember one that lasted two months — when there are fights, suicide attempts, and other disturbances that happened daily.

"That's like working at the beauty shop," Lewis says a few minutes before heading to the visiting room. "Some days people are fine and some days it's like, is there a full moon?"

She is not the only outsider who comes into the jail. Lapeer County is very big on holding classes for inmates, with subjects ranging from how to be a better father to learning various skills. But those classes are designed for inmates. The people who run them know what they're in for. Lewis just needed some extra cash, and her job as a hair stylist as a unique one. The barber chair is a place where people -- on the inside and outside -- feel comfortable, spill secrets, and for a few minutes and a few dollars get to be the center of attention. For someone in an orange jumpsuit and slippers, that doesn't happen very often.

The visiting room is ready for her. An orange extension cord runs in from the hall and through the door propped open by the dustpan. Two plastic chairs are stacked so that the inmates will be at an easier height to cut — still, not having an adjustable barber chair makes it tough for Lewis.

She unzips her black bag of supplies, two sets of clippers that will get uncomfortably hot as she makes cuts back-to-back, and a pair of barber scissors — basically two razors bolted together that will set within arm's reach.

There are 15 inmates on the list today. They'll spend $8 of their own money for a haircut, five more if they want a beard trim — all paid for through an electronic payment system, something that help cuts down on problems that can work their way into jails, like bribing guards. One guard, Davis said, who worked at the prison next-door, is now an inmate in the same place for that reason.

Lewis is dressed in a black hoodie and dark jeans, covered by her apron. She is blonde and attractive, and a deputy advised her before she started to look as ugly as she could, for safety's sake.

"I don't wear much makeup anyway," she says.

The first inmate, a younger man, enters with a friendly hello.

"Buzz it off," he says with a laugh when she asks him what he wants, but then he gets more specific. "I guess a two or a three on the sides."

They settle on a two for the sides and she grabs her clippers and begins, fading the shorter buzz to the longer hair on top. When she's done she tells him to check himself in the mirror.

He stands and walks out the door, across the narrow hall, to the only mirror available to them. It's the outside of the one-way glass of the control room.

"I guess it doesn't matter. Aren't too many people here looking at me," he said, but still, he takes his time, moves his head side-to-side. "OK. Looks good. Thanks."

And he walks back to where he waits to be buzzed back in so the next in line can come. It will become a familiar refrain — they pretend it doesn't matter, but they still want their hair to look like their hair.

"I want the low fade," a later inmate will say.

"Leave the bangs long?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Davis pops his head in now and then to check on things, occasionally joking with them.

"I think you're trying to look like me," he says to one who asks for a crew cut. Davis gets his hair cut every six days.

Lewis's clippers buzz, growing hot, while the hair — blond, brown, black, straight, curly, long — falls into an oval around the chair. A deputy will clean it for her after she leaves.

There isn't much talking today, and Lewis isn't great at staring the conversations because, well, what do you say?

"The usual talk in the beauty shop is, 'Oh, isn't a beautiful day?' or 'What are you out and about doing today?'" They're questions that you can't really ask someone who hasn't been outside for months and has the same routine every day.

Sometimes, she'd rather not talk anyway. She now has regulars, some of whom show up whether they need a haircut or not. For some, she thinks it's a way to break up the monotony, a way to have someone else to talk to. For others, it might be something else. One inmate came to her after she'd cut his hair just three days before.

"He said, 'Hey Jennifer. I used to be an old military man so I like to keep my hair cut every week. So Jennifer, where do you live? Where do you work?'" she said. After a few minutes, his attitude changed from friendly to more serious and strange.

"Why aren't you correcting me? Your name isn't Jennifer and you haven't corrected me," he said.

Lewis told him she couldn't hear over the clippers.

Later on the Fourth, one inmate will get up, check his hair and request that his bangs, already close to his scalp, be cut just a tad shorter. Some people just don't want to leave, and it can be unnerving.

Most, though, are in and out. One asks Davis if he can use his account to pay for a friend's haircut who has a trial coming up and doesn't have any money. Davis says that's fine. That's one more to the list. By the end of the day there will be more than 20. Word gets around.

"Are you the one whose buddy bought your haircut?" she'll ask the young man later when he comes in and mentions he has an upcoming trial he wants to look good. He tells her he is. "That was nice," Lewis says.

Lewis cuts efficiently, quickly and talks easily — so much that one deputy suggested she take the deputy training course. She thought about it, but only briefly. Jail is a depressing place, and there's the danger factor, but those are things she could deal with.

"But those brown uniforms," she said, and shuddered.

Eventually, her last inmate walks in. He has a trial on Monday and wants to get cleaned up — hair buzzed to the scalp and beard trimmed.

He sits down slowly, calmly, taking his time, and closes his eyes while she works. His hair, long overdue for a cut, falls away in chunks. He keeps his eyes closed when she asks him to tilt his head back so she can start knocking down the beard, and if he wasn't responding to the light touch of her fingers guiding his head right and left, he might appear to be asleep. When she finishes, he continues to keep them closed a moment longer, pointed toward the ceiling, before he opens them and stands.

"Go look in the window and make sure that's what you want," she tells him.

He walks to the window and looks himself over.

"Yeah. Thank you. You have a good holiday," he says, and walks back to the door he came from, waiting for it to buzz and let him back in.