Kathy M. Melvin has to go through another woman’s basement room to get to hers, which is slightly larger than a closet. A television blares from behind one wall, and women’s laughter can be heard beyond the opposite one, over the rain outside. Melvin sits up straight on her tall single bed, under her laundry hanging from pipes overhead and across from a dresser crowded with bottles of lotion. “They’re donated,” she explains. “That’s one of our many blessings.”

Once, 15 years ago, Melvin was regarded as a model ex-offender who had kicked her addiction. She had a steady job teaching inmates to go straight, and a state-funded nonprofit paid her to track individual ex-offenders. Still, in November, Melvin moved here–Leslie’s Place, a West Side shelter for female ex-offenders.

Melvin speaks slowly, her arms crossed over a purple sweat suit and a long gold necklace with the letter “K” on the end. “What do you want to know?” she asks politely. “I guess I can give you an overview. I come from a big family of seven children. My father was Irish Catholic and alcoholic. He beat my mom nightly.”

That was in northwest suburban Mount Prospect. Melvin’s mother divorced him, and she and her children lived in a car until she married another alcoholic. The family moved to Des Plaines, just outside Chicago, when Melvin was 12. She was a good student until high school, when she dropped out and started doing heroin. A year later, at 19, she had a son, then left him with her mother and moved with her boyfriend to Chicago.

A year later, Melvin was arrested for selling drugs. She did 10 months in prison, eight months in a drug treatment facility and six months in a halfway house.

For 10 years after that, Melvin was clean. She had earned her GED in jail, and the warden got her a job at the Illinois Department of Corrections once she was released. Melvin traveled to prisons across the state, telling inmates the story of her own recovery. Many of them “put her on a pedestal,” she said, and took Melvin as a role model.

Melvin also worked at Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, known as TASC, where the courts send addicts for drug treatment instead of jail time. She talked to TASC clients and surveyed them periodically to measure their success after they left the program.