The self portraits, some on pink paper decorated with colourful glitter and pinned to the bare walls of a meeting room of Cook County jail, America's largest, resemble the drawings of a ten-year-old. A few have oversize teardrops rolling down their cheeks. "I lost my childhood," says Patrice, an African-American inmate, who is being held on charges of identity theft. Patrice was raped at the age 12, started to work in a strip club on the West side of the city when she was 14 and was lured into prostitution in California by the man she then thought of as her boyfriend at the age of 16. Patrice is one of about 150 women in Division 17, a part of the jail for mostly young women, many of them mothers or pregnant, held on relatively minor charges. Most of them were prostitutes, many have mental-health problems and nearly all are recovering addicts. Katie, a woman in her 20s of Puerto Rican descent, dropped out of school when she was 14, got pregnant by a gang member, had an abortion and started to drink heavily. A few years later she was hooked on crack and heroin and worked as a prostitute for "Josh and John", who put her up in a hotel room, took her earnings (up to $1,700 a day) and supplied her with drugs in exchange.
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