FARMINGTON — Sometimes, she thinks she's the oldest 32-year-old out there.
Alcohol can do that to you.
It helped land her in jail on a felony theft charge, helped her to lose custody of two children and helped her lose any semblance of a "normal life."
It even helped Jill try to cover up the crime of her 15-year-old son, who stole a car. She decided he didn't need to get caught, so she put the car "back" to cover up his crime.
Her efforts didn't fool the cops.
Since July, she's been locked up. And by April 18, she will have completed the six months required in the Davis County Jail's Residential Substance Abuse Treatment program.
She's on work-release, having secured a job working the graveyard shift on a loading dock. School is on her list of things to do, but most importantly, she wants to stay dry.
"A lot of it is a spiritual conversion that happens," RSAT counselor Debbie Rice says. "The disease is a disease of the body and the mind."
Being clean is about much more than staying off the booze or avoiding the drugs, Rice says.
"You have to change thinking behaviors."
Jill agrees.
"It was my best thinking that got me here in jail, and I did my best thinking when I was drinking."
Up and running for a year, the Davis County Jail RSAT program has graduated 120 people. Participants also have
sessions on anger management, life skills, group therapy, individual therapy and relapse prevention. At the end of the six-month program, if they graduate, the court hands out the options of either reducing their sentence by six months or shipping them over to the Davis work center, where offenders hold down jobs and start inching back toward normalcy.
Program supporters say RSAT works because it is an intense program in contrast to some jail drug programs that are only 60 to 90 days.
Counselors say the longer time period allows addicts a better chance of success, especially in the confines of a jail.
"It forces you to deal with issues of people who are still using. There are a lot of people who are coming in and coming off drugs," Jill said. "It's not some cush little environment that has a little coffee pot."
Rice, a counselor with Davis Behavioral Health, said that same setting can present challenges.
"The morale of most is low because the population is depressed due to being in jail. They have that mentality of 'them against us,' which makes it difficult to get them to trust us as counselors."
In addition to the distrust, Rice and the program's other counselor, Nick Miller, have to deal with participants who are chronic addicts.
Most of them have completed some type of substance-abuse rehabilitative program before and failed.
Despite this, Rice said when the job came open late last summer, she put in for it.
"The reward is being able to see just that one person who has been able to change their life. It is not only that person's life that has changed, but it's everyone around them who loves them — their kids, their parents, everyone."