Independence Days

It's a Monday afternoon, and women in green jumpsuits are passing the time in their crowded dorm at the city jail near Raytown Road and Interstate 435. Some sprawl on plastic beds strewn with blankets and thin pillows. A few read well-thumbed books from the jail library.

A couple of strangers walk in wearing street clothes, and a guard calls out, "Anybody want to watch a video?"

"Anything to get out of this place," one woman says with a shrug.

So a dozen female convicts walk in jail-issue flip-flops across a grassy courtyard, serenaded by catcalls from the men hanging out in a fenced recreation yard to their right.

The women file into the visiting area, where they unfold metal chairs and sit down. Someone has rolled a television into the room, and a video begins to play.

"Prostitution was easy because that's all men ever approached me for anyway," a woman on the video explains. "'It's time to fuck. Take your clothes off.' So I figured that's all I had going for me. Take your clothes off, get buck naked, get paid, and then feel like shit and go get high."

The inmates watch as Norma, a former prostitute who was addicted to heroin for 21 years, roams the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin district, hugging bedraggled hookers who know her by name. Police photos of hopeless prostitutes flash on the screen, each face carved by years of drug addiction, beatings and rapes.

"My name is Saundra Domingue, and I am a 28-year heroin user," a voice says as a mug shot shows a slit-eyed hooker with wild hair. Then the camera closes in on a pretty, smiling woman with glowing skin -- today's Sondra -- who now works for a prostitute recovery program in San Francisco.

The inmates gasp at the disparate images.

After the video, Kristy Childs and Samantha Steeves, who are visiting the Municipal Correctional Institution, suggest that the women move their chairs into a circle.

Childs spent eighteen years as a streetwalker. Steeves worked as a stripper. Both were dope addicts. They aren't out to judge anyone, Steeves tells the inmates.

One woman, "Donna," admits she was a prostitute on Independence Avenue for thirteen years. A few months ago, she went into a drug-treatment program and was clean for the first time in years. After she got out, though, it wasn't long before she bought a crack pipe. She gave it to another addict, she says, but got high an hour later anyway.

"When I hit on that pipe, I felt like shit," she says. "I want to stay clean so bad. I don't want to go back out to Independence Avenue. I just feel like all I know how to do is mess up."

Social workers at the Missouri Division of Family Services have taken away Donna's children, who live in foster homes. She can't forgive herself. "What kind of person gives up her own kids for crack?" she asks.

"It's not an overnight process," Steeves tells her. "Just the fact that you gave that crack pipe to someone else the first time is still progress."

"I was always told I was a no-good piece of shit, and that's all I'm going to be all my life," another woman says. "I don't have any idea how to accept real love. The self I see doing drugs and the self I see walking the streets selling my body, I know that's not me."

One woman fears that even if she stays clean after she gets out of jail, her old running buddies will pull her back.

Childs tells them she's been clean for ten years, so they can hang out with her.

Childs' turnaround hasn't been easy. Even sitting among these inmates as a confident woman who has left her past behind, she knows that she and her family are still struggling with the effects of a lifetime of poor choices. She is able to help women she barely knows. But her own daughter has fallen into a dangerous lifestyle of drugs and violence.

Childs grew up in Joplin. At thirteen, tired of being beaten and ridiculed by her stepfather, Childs hitched a ride with a trucker on Highway 71 and eventually headed west.

It was 1975, and the small-town runaway made easy prey. A driver would buy her a chicken-fried-steak dinner and want sex in return. A blow job for a can of soup. She owed them, they told her.

"These were grown men," Childs recalls. "Some of them were old enough to be my grandfather."

Childs ended up in Denver, where she shared a grimy house and a platonic friendship with a junkie named Harvey. They had no electricity, heat or running water.

Harvey warned Childs that he'd throw her out if she ever used heroin. But another junkie, called Space Ghost, tied off her arm one afternoon on an apartment rooftop. He injected the warm narcotic into her vein, and Childs threw up. But the ensuing euphoria soon had her hooked.

When gangrene infected Harvey's foot and he couldn't afford medicine, Childs knew how to earn money for the prescription. One night, she slipped out the door and headed for nearby Colfax Avenue.