"Come on ladies!"

With the yell of a security guard, Roxanne’s day begins at 4:45a.m. As her feet hit the cold cement she is reminded of where she is.

"My mother started giving me drugs when I was fourteen. I didn’t know it was wrong, especially with my own mother giving it to me."

Roxanne is serving time in the Bexar County Correctional Unit in San Antonio, Texas. It is a rehabilitation center where juveniles with crimes ranging from DWI to rape are placed. She is serving three months for theft.

"I started stealing to support my drug habit. My habit began at $100 a day and when I was arrested it was near $400."

She is out of the showers by five and into her blue prison uniform. She slips her hands into dirty, yellow cleaning gloves. Down on her hands and knees she scrubs the tile on the bathroom floor for an hour.

"Breakfast!" Announces the same security guard, and all nine girls throw the dirty gloves back into their lockers. The girls line up and Roxanne slips in line behind two girls wearing red prison uniforms. They march to the cafeteria and sit silently eating cold eggs and toast.

"It’s not real food I miss," she says, "It’s my family." Tears begin rolling down her face. Until this point she has been hard and withdrawn–but thoughts of those she has hurt break her. "The first thing I will do when I leave is visit my family. I miss them so much. When I was on drugs I didn’t care about my family–I mean, I cared, but not the way I should have. I always took advantage of them."

By family she is referring to her dad, aunt and younger brother. Her mother is in jail somewhere--forgotten about. Her brother barely speaks to her–she pawned everything from his train set to his Nintendo.

The cafeteria--in reality--is just a large room with the same cold cement floors found in the bunkroom. The walls are blank and color has not found its way into the room. The girls will serve their time confined to two rooms–the bunkroom and the cafeteria. The bunkroom consists of twenty bunk beds covered with dull, gray blankets. A footlocker rests at the end of each bed. Inside are a change of clothes, cleaning gloves and a small amount of change. One wall consists of glass windows. On the other side is a 24-hour surveillance room. From here every action is monitored.

When the girls enter the facility, they wear blue prison uniforms. Good behavior will result in a red uniform. With a red uniform comes the privilege of thirty minutes of television and access to the vending machine.

"The system teaches us that we have to earn things. Once we have earned a color we have to work to keep it. It’s all about learning to show respect so that you will get respect in return."

One girl in the group wears orange. "This is her second time to be convicted" explains Roxanne, "She has no privileges and can never talk."

The orange girl eats her breakfast staring at the wall. Two scars run down the side of her face, reminders of the abusive relationship she just ended. Before the scars she had been clean for three years. The break-up sent her into a deep depression and back onto drugs. Roxanne can hardly look her in the face–it’s a painful reminder of her own past relationship.

"My habit was easier to support when I was dating a dealer--I could just steal from his stash. As long as his clients didn’t notice they were being shortchanged I could get my drugs free."

Then one of his clients noticed. Her boyfriend didn’t ask any questions--he just beat her unconscious. She still cringes when she touches her cheekbone.

When breakfast is over the girls will march back to the bunkroom. For the next hour they will sit on their lockers and think.

"I never thought I had a problem until I had so much time to think. All day long I am forced to think about my problem."

All nine girls sit in silence–thinking-- until they are dismissed promptly at ten o’clock for volleyball. The facility concentrates on routine, meditation and cognitive restructuring.

"Here at our center we are not concerned with their education or job training–we are concerned with how they think," Roxanne’s supervisor chimes in. If you lock a person away and then send them back on the street you haven’t changed how they think. You can get them a job or an education but they tend to go back to the same habits. When we work with the young ladies here we teach them that they can change their way of thinking. When they leave they have a more positive self-image. When they are put back into their old situations they now have a new thought process–this process will help them not to use the drugs again."

Their statistics back up their claims: 7 out of 10 residents will never relapse back into their habits. They have the second highest success rate in the state. This explains the mandatory three-hour class the girls attend after volleyball. Grammar and history are set aside for thought processes.

"The restructuring is real good. Everything they teach--giving respect to get respect and how to cope with things that come into your life--is helping. I have learned that everyone has problems but not everyone turns to drugs for a solution."

The facility offers the opportunity for residents to obtain their GED but it’s not stressed. Most facilities in Texas require the residents to attend GED classes. This results in students only obtaining it because they have to. However, the center believes by not forcing GED classes, students will choose to take the classes with a different mind-frame.

After morning classes and a short lunch, the yellow gloves go back on. Two more hours of scrubbing the grime of toilets and sinks. As Roxanne scrubs the toilets she is reminded of the time she spent in jail.

"The first part of my sentence I served in Kendall County Jail. It was the worst period of my life. I was in complete denial–I thought I was in control of my life but here they were telling me I was all messed up."

She talks about jail with guilt in her eyes. She avoids eye contact and continuously taps her foot on the floor.

"I hated it–it was so degrading. The women and men were all locked up facing each other. When the men flushed, the toilet sewer would run up into our cell. Sewer flies would swarm around me when I slept. I cried all day and all night. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let me out."

Roxanne was held in jail for three months without bond. The judge released her into the care of her father with the affirmation she would go into a rehabilitation center. When she arrived at the facility she was going through withdrawal from methadone and heroin.

"On top of the sewer flies was my withdrawal from the drugs. I was so sick that I couldn’t move. I’ve never been through anything like it before. Your bones hurt, you are throwing up, your head pounds and you have anxiety attacks. During all this your body goes from chilled to hot in minutes. When they released me my father had to carry me out because I couldn’t stand up. That is why I kept using heroin--I didn’t want to be sick so I had to have it."

When she lived with the dealer she didn’t have to worry about finding the heroin. When he kicked her out she woke up every morning with the goal of shooting up as soon as possible. By the time she was sixteen she had tried PCP, acid, marijuana, crack, and opium, but heroin became her drug of choice.

The security guard enters the bathroom and alerts the girls that the cleaning is over. The bathroom is a continuation of the bunkroom. A short wall is all that separates the two. Privacy is not a privilege afforded to the girls.

Roxanne has had a hard time adjusting to living with nine other girls.

"I talk to them but it’s a lot of different personalities trying to cope. It was really difficult at first. We all come from different backgrounds–rich, poor. My whole life I have never gotten a long well with girls. It’s hard for me to hear them tell me how to do something. I never had authority in my life and now suddenly I have all these girls telling me how to do things."

The afternoon is filled with more cognitive restructuring. When class is over the girls have two hours of silent studying.

"Basically all we do here is clean and study. We start early every morning and don’t get in bed until ten o’clock. At first it bothered me but now I just want to get better. I don’t care what it takes. We earn community service hours with the cleaning we do. That’s really good for me because I have to complete one hundred hours for my probation. I get out of here in January. After that I go on outside probation until March."

Roxanne looks back down at her homework with a deep concentration.

"Do you think you will use again when you get out?"

Again she is broken. "I don’t want to. I am going to try real hard. I am hopefully going to be living in a better environment." She brushes off the tear and continues, "It’s going to be real hard because it will never go away. Once you have a drug problem you always have a problem. I am just going to keep myself real busy so I don’t use. I hate having to see what I have done with my life. I have hurt so many people that I want to make things better."

Outside the facilities fences Roxanne’s lawyer works hard to get her probation transferred to Austin. Her father has agreed to take Roxanne in–if she remains clean. This would mean that she would serve her year of probation outside the facility with her father. An aunt has agreed to give her a job and help her go to school. If her transfer is denied the odds could be against her. The only one she knows in San Antonio is a drug dealer. If she were released to San Antonio she would have a greater chance of falling back into her old habits.

"Do you think this program works?"

"I think it works for the people who want it to work. I know that when I was on drugs I was totally different. I was mean and I beat up on people and the littlest things set me off. When I didn’t have the money to score all of this came out. Now that I have been clean for four months I have a better view of things. My first priority used to be drugs and now it’s not. Sometimes it takes getting to a certain point. It’s really hard. There are a lot of people who don’t want to change and they don’t see what they are doing is wrong. Anyone can change but they have to want to change. That is when this program works."

Study hours have ended and the girls line up for dinner. Roxanne looks as if she’s suddenly embarrassed about standing in a line of nine criminals. She glares at the floor as if she is afraid it’s going somewhere.

She will have two more months of cognitive thinking. When her sentence finishes at the facility she will have a chance to apply her new skills. Only Roxanne knows if she will fall in the seventy- percent or the thirty.

In preparation for my interview I ate breakfast with the Chief Probation Officer in San Antonio. Together we went over my interview questions and then headed out to the Bexar County Correctional Unit. When we approached the gate I became very apprehensive about my interview. What if I was assigned to someone who wouldn’t talk to me or was a horrible person? When we entered the main building fifty male prisoners were hard at work. The man who was accompanying me yelled at them to face the wall. At once fifty heads turned the direction facing away from me. Immediately I realized that the administration had a strong hold on the residents of the facility. I was led into a business office where Polaroid shots of nine women were posted up on a bulletin board. I was able to pick from the nine.

I chose Roxanne because she was my age and from a town near mine. She had been arrested and was serving time for theft but it was the result of her drug problem. Her hair was long in the picture and I was told she would not look the same because all the girls are forced to cut their hair off.

I was led to a small office where her probation officer gave me her background. It was hard to comprehend a mother giving her own child drugs. Before he went to get Roxanne he told me that I would be shocked at how normal she was.

When our interview was over I was given the opportunity to observe the bunkroom. Nine women stared at me the entire time. Only now they didn’t make me nervous–instead I realized they were all real people with tough problems.

I didn’t want to leave Roxanne. I wanted to send her letters and check-up on her recovery but the center won’t allow it. I have a whole new respect for our corrections system now. I had the preconceived idea that I would be interviewing someone who just sat in their cell all day. However, I had to do the interview in the one hour of down time they had. The facility had the residents busy all day long. I was amazed that their day began at 4:45 a.m. and lasted until 10 p.m.

I walked away from this assignment with reassurance that rehabilitation can work. I feel confident that Roxanne will have the thought process to equip her with any future situations.

Association of Academic Psychiatrists. "Rehabilitation." American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. 79 (1) 1998.

Interviews Conducted with:

Caesar Garcia, Chief Probation Officer of San Antonio, Texas

Roxanne Garza, Inmate

Herbert May, Probation Officer, San Antonio, Texas