Feb. 7--The police pulled over the car for driving with a broken taillight and speeding through a school zone -- a routine traffic stop, until they searched the passenger's purse.

With cold medicine, lithium batteries, filters and plastic baggies, Kristi Nichols admits she was shopping for the ingredients to make methamphetamine.

"It started with alcohol in the military," she explains.

Trained to be an operating room technician, Nichols kept a jug of half orange juice and half vodka in the refrigerator, so her bunkmates never knew she was drinking every night.

"I learned how to hide substance abuse. I thought I could get away with it forever."

Mostly out of curiosity, Nichols decided to try meth after she left the Army in 2007.

"I had always been the good girl, making everybody proud," she says. "Just once, I wanted to experience the other side of life."

The other side, as she soon found out, included losing custody of her three children, all under age 6.

While Nichols was high, one daughter fell out of a second-floor window, luckily escaping serious injuries.

Another time, her oldest daughter needed skin grafts after she opened an oven door and sat down on the hot surface.

After that, Nichols' ex- husband convinced her to sign away all rights.

"And that's when the drug use really spiraled out of control," she says. "I just didn't care anymore. I didn't care about myself. I didn't care about anything."

Just a year after first trying meth, the 25-year-old Tulsan found herself in a holding cell, waiting for a court appearance on charges of "endeavoring to manufacture."

Strangely, one of the other female prisoners seemed excited about going in front of the judge.

"What's up with you?" Nichols asked.

"Oh, I can't wait," the other woman explained. "I'm going to Women in Recovery."

"What," Nichols asked, "is Women in Recovery?"

'Working miracles'

With 134 out of every 100,000 women locked up, Oklahoma has the highest female incarceration rate in the country, creating a domino effect on state-funded social services.

"The women go to prison and their children very often go to foster care," says Mimi Tarrasch, the director of special programs for Family and Children's Services.

"The children are more likely to drop out of school, so you have them on welfare. And the expenses keep multiplying."

To break the chain, Tarrasch went with a delegation of Tulsa officials last year to visit New York, where a program called "Crossroads for Women" offers drug treatment as an alternative to prison time.

"These aren't hardened criminals we're talking about," she says. "At least, they're not hardened yet. We still have a chance to turn them around."

With a $635,000 grant from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Tulsa's own "Women in Recovery" program started June 1 and currently has 25 women enrolled.

The Kaiser money will support the project for two years, after which the program will need to seek more grants, state funding or both.

While in the program for up to 12 months, the women will remain under the supervision of Tulsa County Court Services, and they will usually spend the night in half-way houses, subject to strict curfews and frequent drugs tests.

In the early stages of the program, women wear ankle monitors that are so accurate they can tell if someone is riding in a speeding car.

"Our issue is accountability," says Sherri Carrier, the director of Court Services. "These women were arrested for breaking the law, and we're not just letting them go."

So far, 27 women have started the program; two failed to complete it and were returned to the court system. Before sending them to Women in Recovery, the state was spending $54.13 a day to keep each in the Tulsa Jail.

Since the woman have been in the Recovery program, the state has saved a combined $201,038, according to District Judge Clancy Smith.

"The amount of money we're spending to send women to prison, it's not sustainable," Smith said during a recent tour of the Women in Recovery facilities near 36th Street North and Cincinnati Avenue.

"So I'm willing to give this a try, and from what I've seen so far, they're working miracles."

'Confident of success'

Sculpted out of Play-Doh, a colorful flower tilts precariously on its side, petals almost touching the tabletop.

"It's wilting," a woman explains, "just like my relationship is dying."

Another woman has sculpted an image of herself, complete with curly hair, flattened on the table like it was run over by a steamroller.

"It's beaten down and crushed," she says, "the way my relationship was crushing me."

Treating addiction means breaking all kinds of bad habits, so the women spend several hours a week in group therapy to deal with issues including unhealthy romances and credit-card spending.

After lunch, they push the tables and chairs against the wall to make room for yoga.

"They told us yoga would help us release our emotions, but I thought, 'Boring,' " says Nichols, who has been enrolled in the program since October. "Then one day I'm in a stretching position and just started crying and crying."

Now cleaned up and sober, she hopes to start visitation with her children soon and eventually win back partial custody.

"I never want to go back to the way life was," she says. "I never want to be that person again."

Nichols' success, however -- and the success of the entire Women in Recovery experiment -- will depend on long-term results.

Will Nichols and the other women stay off drugs?

How many will recommit offenses and be back in jail?

Can drug treatment reduce the incarceration rate?

"I'm confident of success," says Tarrasch, the program director, "because we're dealing with the whole person, changing the habits that would lead them back into addiction."

The program already is planning to move into a larger building, with the goal of expanding to 50 women by June and to as many as 200 next year.

There's talk of branching out to Oklahoma City, with hope that state funding will pick up where the Kaiser Foundation leaves off.

"You can't succeed if you don't first take a chance and try something different," Tarrasch says. "So here we are, trying."

Michael Overall 581-8383 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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