"We've been given a second chance with them and we don't know what to do with it. We're learning what to do with it."

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RaNae Curtis, 33, found Chelsea Street more than a year ago. She looks at her police booking photo every day. She hardly recognizes the woman staring back at her. In the picture, she has a distant stare and greasy hair. She hasn't showered in nearly three weeks. She has just come down from a meth run.

"It disgusts me," she says. "I don't even think it's me."

But it is her. That's why she looks at it. It reminds her of a life she never wants to go back to.

Meth wasn't her initial drug of choice. She popped 70 to 80 Lortab pills a day. She slammed heroin. She went to jail for prescription drug fraud. But it was meth that caused her to lose her home, her husband and her son.

Curtis has been clean, for the most part, for 15 months now. She has her own house-cleaning business and an adopted home. She has an advocate in the Chelsea Street founder, Jane Patience.

She no longer dons her worst rags to panhandle for drug money. Patience calls her a star.

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A police officer who raided her apartment told Amanda Evans to take a good look at her two children.

"Look how cute your kids are," he told her. "Look what you're doing to them."

Evans, 22, went to jail. Her daughter and son went into protective custody. A cousin was awarded temporary guardianship. They were separated for a year while she successfully completed a treatment program and graduated from Family Drug Court.

"It was really hard . . . to see how much better someone else could take care of my kids than I could."

Evans and her live-in boyfriend are learning to be a family. Both have steady jobs. Peer parents visit their home weekly.

"I was overwhelmed. I was a young mother, so I never knew who I was or what I wanted in life. Having my kids taken away gave me an opportunity to see all that."

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Utah State Prison inmate Leslie Mikesell managed for many years to hide her meth addiction from her sons and her husband, who was a police officer.

One day while making lunch, the police came and took her away. "No one had any idea," she said.

After her first stint in prison Mikesell, 40, a hairdresser, said she "couldn't get to a needle fast enough.

"Why? I have no answer. It's worse than the devil, if there is such a thing."