Tricia Binette grasps the handle of a Maine Correctional Center van door and slides it open. With a huge smile across her delicately featured face—and a hint of fear in her eyes—she steps down and looks back at a fence that she has not been outside of in three years. She made it. But it’s just the beginning. Now, Trish will have to stay clean and piece together her life after five years of serious drug use. Trish was raised in foster homes and alone on the street since she was ten years old. During which her son, now six, was taken away from her because she was deemed unfit to raise him.

It won’t be easy. The apartment that Tricia was able to secure is next door to a crack house. Every time she goes to pick up food stamps, she sees old friends from when she was homeless, and customers in search of drugs still recognize her—even after the hundred pounds she gained in prison.

Trish is strong and determined though and she is in a promising position: she has an apartment, a job, enough food and she is saving money to get the tools she needs to start her stained-glass projects again—to keep herself busy and away from temptation. Trish has sober friends. She has determination. And she has hope. In a strange way, Trish says, prison saved her life; more than one of her friends overdosed while she was incarcerated. With her infectious warmth, Tricia affirms, “Everyday, I feel lucky.”