Tue, Jan 29, 2008 - Page 19 News List

FEATURE: Super Bowl offers business for `circuit girls'

THE BIG GAME An officer from the Jacksonville sheriff's department said policing prostitution is not as important as security, but officers are assigned nevertheless

AP , PHOENIX

"A lot of my life is really fuzzy to me because of all the drugs I was doing," she said. "But of course it changed me."

Miller became a traveling circuit girl in her early 20s, after a pimp kidnapped her while she was working the streets of west Phoenix. The pimp -- his name is Vinnie -- stopped the car in Long Beach and told her to "get to work" as one of his 13 girls.

Miller said it wasn't until police arrested her a few years ago that she mustered the strength to get away. She thought Vinnie loved her, but he left her in jail for two months.

"I was just so crushed that he let me sit," she said.

That was when Miller said she found the DIGNITY House, a Phoenix-based rehabilitation program founded by a former prostitute and run by Catholic Charities in Arizona. The agency helped her find a job and put her up in a house.

With DIGNITY, Miller said she found her salvation. After two years, she is so free from the lifestyle that she hardly remembers the street words she used to sling back and forth with other hookers.

When she bumped into her pimp recently at a gas station, she did what she never could do before: She stood her ground.

"He came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said, `Hey, I'm going to California. Are you ready?' And I said `You know what, look, I'm not the person I used to be. I'm getting married, I don't need you.'"

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