April Chase, who is completing Off the Streets, a program that helps women leave prostitution, enjoys a spring day in downtown Cincinnati.

For the 21 years that April Chase worked the streets of Avondale as a prostitute, she worked for many things. Most nights - and days and afternoons - she worked for crack cocaine. Some nights she traded sex for a place to sleep, a pair of second-hand shoes, a plate of hot food.

She thought her body was the only commodity she had to sell to keep herself in drugs, to keep herself in that space where she didn't feel the frustration of motherhood too young, the boredom of a life that was going nowhere. The space where, in fact, she didn't feel a thing.

But she was wrong. What she actually put out on the streets every night, what she left in the possession of men who didn't care to know her name, what she traded for crack and the tawdriest of objects was her soul.

By the time April came to the point where she believed she was worth more than a battered pair of shoes, she had 28 criminal convictions and had spent more than 1,600 days in jail and prison. She had been beaten, threatened with guns and knives, stung by bedbugs and the disgusted looks of passersby. The police were very familiar with April and the other women who racked up 653 prostitution charges in the city last year, and 510 more in the county, clogging the criminal justice system.

The officers watched them first appear on the streets, young and scared and vulnerable. They watched them work their trade over time and lose their youth, and then their fear and finally, if not their lives, at least their aliveness.

It became a game, except there was no winner. Officers gathered up the women. Judges got them into drug treatment programs, sometimes put them in jail or on probation but then like a revolving door that leads nowhere, they were inevitably back on the streets.

Until three years ago, when a collaborative program began offering women a way out of prostitution. Run by Cincinnati Union Bethel, it's called Off the Streets.

Friday, April and nine other women will graduate from the program, joining the sisterhood of 36 women who have turned their backs on prostitution and their faces to education and jobs, who have let go of their fear and grabbed hold of their talents, who have lost their addictions and in the process found, once again, their souls.

Last month, Off the Streets was one of three national programs to win the Mutual of America Community Partnership Award, as well as proclamations from the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. It offers women housing, refers them to substance abuse and mental health counseling, connects them to clinics, sometimes college and ultimately to themselves.

For April, completing the program is an intensely personal victory. She has a job now as a cook, gets a regular paycheck, isn't threatened or beaten, and is working her way back to having custody of her sons, who were taken from her seven years ago.

But April's success is a success for the city as well. Prostitution is a crime that breeds more crime, as the women who practice it become victims and sometimes perpetrators, as the degradation of the acts they perform leads them to more substance abuse and addiction. "The path of dreadfulness," April calls it.

She is on a different path now, a path she believes God has laid open before her. She is healthy. She is humbled. She is healing. And she is happy, although "I need to not get too overly happy because I might rock the boat a little," she says cautiously.

After 21 years of struggle, she smiles at the thought that her soul is her own again, and happiness her biggest fear.

Krista Ramsey is a member of the Enquirer Editorial Board; e-mail her at kramsey@enquirer.com