Now Ann was panicked that the judge might not let her remain free before the trial, which was customary for small offenses. Shaking with nerves and exhaustion, she sat down on a chair in the waiting room and fumbled with her purse. Her eyes were dry and lined with red. She had not taken out her contact lenses in weeks for lack of a case.

The two Walmart security guards who apprehended Ann the evening before were also crowded into the tiny waiting room, there for someone else’s hearing. They looked away from Ann, and she avoided their eyes, busying herself with her phone and applying concealer and lipstick with a trembling hand.

“I did some shady things, I have to get my act together,” Ann said under her breath. “But it’s been very, very hard. Very.” For weeks, she had been catching sleep, along with a crowd of other users, in motel rooms that a new dealer friend let them use when he didn’t need them for business. Every day, the crew woke up and started the same routine: What could they buy? Where could they buy it? Who had the cash? How would they get there? She was using crack, was sleepless and agitated; her nails were lined with dirt, and she had a broken finger that she thought was infected, its splint grimy.

Eventually a public defender came out of the courtroom, a tall, balding man with a baby face and a reassuringly adult suit. He could not represent Ann, he explained, until she filed the appropriate paperwork, but he could give her some advice: Don’t lie. Try to sound calm. Volunteer to go straight to rehabilitation therapy as a condition of bail. Ann was praying the hearing would be postponed until she had a public defender assigned. She was terrified of jail.

Tom had tried to warn her this day was coming. The one time she visited him in jail, Ann was high, and now that he wasn’t using drugs anymore, he couldn’t bear to see her that way. He told her she had to get off heroin. “I can’t,” she told him. He knew he would have said the same thing months before: Tom was the one with the 50-bag-a-day habit, the one who had overdosed on a mix of heroin and Xanax, only to rush out of the hospital so he could go back home and shoot up. In jail, he had no choice but to stop using, and in a strange way, he was grateful. “I’ve had a lot of time to think it over,” he said, when I visited him in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility. “It’s not all about me. I’ve got two kids, and they’re suffering.” Loose-limbed, with a steady gaze, Tom said he was resolved to stay off drugs when he got out, though he looked wary as he said it: He knew how hard it would be. He could not say what his future would hold with Ann, but he felt responsible for where her life had gone. “To be dead honest,” he said quietly, “it’s all my doing.”

Once she was seated in front of the magistrate, a tidy-looking man with dark hair, Ann reached deep into the recesses of memory and pulled out an earlier version of herself: the passable student teachers liked, who used to go shopping for clothing with her mom, who showed up for a steady job with manicured nails, who changed her son’s diapers and gazed into his crib with pride. “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” she told the judge. “I really don’t. If possible, if I could get into something today?” She was asking for some kind of a treatment program. “I was on heroin,” she told him, “but I haven’t used in the last two weeks.”

Ann’s father had known the magistrate since he was a boy: He and the magistrate’s father had worked together at a local coal mine. Now Ann’s father sat in the back of the courtroom, arms folded in disgust at the state of his daughter. The magistrate listened carefully to Ann, then set the bail at $10,000. The public defender had gently tried to warn Ann that the judge might set a high bail — given her obvious drug problem, given that even previous arrests did not seem to deter her from committing more crimes. But Ann was nevertheless shocked: “I’m going to jail?” she asked, incredulous. Many months down the road, Ann could be referred to treatment court, where her record would be expunged if she underwent a prolonged period of treatment with clean drug tests. But all of that was an abstraction; now she was filled with the immediate fear of the humiliations of jail, the utter loss of control. Tom went to jail, and he was still there, six months later.