I am writing in response to Joe Usher's guest column "Why not take a stab at rehabilitation?" in the State Journal on March 25. His article hit home for me and many other women housed at Taycheeda Correctional Institute near Fond du Lac.

More than half of the 800 women at Taycheeda are here because we are addicts. Most are women between the ages of 35 and 60, educated, married and with children.

Wisconsin has the highest rate of drunken driving, and it only keeps growing.

I have spent my entire life trying to beat my alcoholism. But somehow it always wins. I've had this disease passed down through generations, and now I am watching it affect my children.

I have come to the conclusion that I cannot control it anymore. I am literally helpless. So, I've let it go and have given it to my higher power.

Many women sit here and deal with the fact they have taken a life because of their addiction. Luckily, I never have. Every family is touched by addiction. But until they face it themselves, people think it's an issue of willpower.

It's not! It is an inherited, genetic disease. If one is genetically predisposed, it doesn't take much to make that green-eyed monster bigger and meaner.

In a March 2008 issue of Newsweek, it said "addicts trying to quit will always need psychological support. The old white-knuckle wisdom that addicts simply lack resolve passed out of fashion decades ago."

Today a vaccine is being tested to help addicts. Our brains are malfunctioning as surely as the pancreas in a diabetic. In both cases "lifestyle choices" may be the contributing factors. But no one regards that as a reason to withhold insulin from a diabetic.

According to David Rosenblum, a public-health professor and addiction expert at Boston University, "We are making unprecedented advances in understanding the biology of addiction."

Each institution in the state of Wisconsin receives $30,000 per head per year for their offenders. Think of the amount of rehabilitation that would buy. Not only would it cut back on repeat offenders, but in time we could see less children inheriting that addictive gene.

Forcing us to rub elbows with murderers, thieves and child molesters is not the way to handle this. Instead, the system needs to buck up and do what has been done since the 1930s. Alcoholics Anonymous is the only answer. We need treatment revolving around the "12 steps" and a higher power.

Let Joe and his old-timers help us. They aren't only committed because of who and what they are, but because they're the only ones who can help.

It's obviously not working any other way. The numbers don't lie.

Gundersen is an inmate at Taycheeda Correctional Institute.