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program—was all I had left to live for. Bitch, sit down! All the poor decisions I had ever made in my life flashed before my eyes before the judge shut her down.
    He agreed to send me to treatment instead of prison. If I did not complete the program, I would automatically be sentenced to three and a half years in state prison. It was a risk, but one I was willing to take. I finally started to breathe. I had never left jail and stayed clean. In fact, I had never stayed clean while in jail. The cravings had always overtaken my desire to try something different. A person in the know like myself would have access to a wide array of substances even behind bars. I had requested to be put in the “treatment” section of the jail this time. I was finally committed to something besides getting high. As the judgepointed out, this was “the first intelligent decision” I had made in a decade.
    I was put into a residential treatment program for criminal offenders, meaning we all came from jail or prison. This made the place both sexually charged and dangerous. There were roughly ten men for every female in the facility. When I got off the bus from jail, a pack of men were waiting to greet us. I felt like a bloody steak in front of a bunch of lions looking for their next meal. I learned later that on smoke breaks the men would place bets on who was going to have sex with which of the incoming females.
    When women walk into rehab they find the same type of men, if not the very same man, they are trying to escape, making it truly difficult for them to reset their lives. It didn’t take long before many of my peers were having quickies in stairwells or on the Dumpster behind the building. Those twelve-step meetings ended in a few pregnancies.
    Whenever I had imagined rehab before I got there, I suppose I thought of it as some sort of well-lit health spa, with time to relax to ease back into society. The treatment facility was the exact opposite of what I had expected. In fact, the place was just one step up from jail. It was in a large brick former warehouse with beds on three floors. Women were placed on the first floors where there were twenty bunks in two rooms. The beds were never full. Many women I met felt pressured by family responsibilities to immediately return home. Time and time again, I would see a woman crying on a pay phone in the hall and see her bed empty the next day. The women tended to fight on a daily basis—anything to distract them from the knowledge that theirchildren were sitting in foster care while they were watching TV in the women’s lounge. The stories I heard there made me uncomfortable. They were The Jerry Springer Show crossed with the worst horror movie, except these stories were real. As if on cue, the women would sit in a circle and tell stories of the children they had lost, their rapes, or years of molestation at the hands of someone they had trusted. I felt the impact of their stories, but I couldn’t make the tears flow, not even for myself.
    On the Sunday after I arrived, everyone was required to be in the “house” for a group meeting. I was excited to see everyone at one time. Eighty of us crammed ourselves into the cafeteria, each with his or her own story. Some used crack, others meth; some were alcoholics on parole for their fourth DUI. A few had jobs and children, and there were those who were there just to get off “paperwork.”
    The man who facilitated the meeting was well dressed, with a gold chain around his neck and sunglasses on his head. He drove an old Porsche and sported new braces, paid for with his brand new dental insurance. He spoke about having one year clean, which seemed impossible to me.
    A hush fell as he said, “Look around the room. To your right and left.” He paused for effect. “Of everyone here, only two of you are going to make it.”
    Under the fluorescent lights, I felt people all around me lose