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By the time Ginny Burton was 14 years old, she was smoking crack cocaine. By 16, she was the victim of sexual assault, addicted to heroin, and already facing the kind of trauma most people couldn’t imagine in a lifetime. But at 48, she walked across a graduation stage wearing honors cords from the University of Washington. This is the extraordinary story of how one woman escaped a life of addiction, crime, and incarceration — and became a symbol of hope, redemption, and resilience.
Early Life: Born into Chaos
Ginny Burton’s story begins in Tacoma, Washington, in the early 1970s. She was one of seven children born into a deeply dysfunctional home. Her father was a career criminal, eventually imprisoned for armed robbery. Her mother, struggling with mental illness, began using and distributing drugs and didn’t shield her children from that life — she introduced Ginny to marijuana when she was just six years old, and by age 12, Ginny was already using methamphetamine.
That same year, her mother handed her a meth pipe and told her, “You might as well learn it from me.”
The childhood most people use to build dreams, Ginny spent building survival mechanisms. Drugs became her escape, her coping mechanism, and eventually, her prison.
This is Ginny’s story. She is my Hero.
Ginny as a baby with her mother, who was a drug addict and drug dealer. (Photo: Ginny Burton)
She was born in Tacoma in 1972. She was one of seven children born to a mother who was a drug addict and a drug dealer who suffered from mental illness.
Her father was sent to prison when she was four for a string of armed robberies.
Her mother introduced her to marijuana at the age of six.
She got her using meth at age 12.
By 14 she was smoking crack.
Childhood photo of Ginny Burton. (Photo: Ginny Burton)
At 16 she was raped by a man who bought drugs from her mother.
By 17 she’d attempted suicide for the first of many times.
She got pregnant and the baby’s father was shot and killed.
She eventually had two children and married into an abusive relationship.
At 21 she started shooting heroin. By 23 she was a full-on, hardcore heroin addict.
Ginny Burton, a little girl surrounded by squalor, addiction, and violence, had become a grown woman surrounded by squalor, addiction, and violence. She never had a chance.
Ginny and a guy named Jack used to feed their addiction by robbing Mexican drug dealers at gunpoint. They knew that they wouldn’t go to the cops because they were undocumented.
She was hell on wheels.
She said to me once:
‘I am that person. I have 17 felony convictions. I am the person you used to clutch your bag when I walked by you. I am the person that would randomly attack somebody in public. I was not a savory person. Everybody was a victim, and everybody was prey.’
The pictures of Ginny in those days tell the story of a young woman who was reeling out of control, a swirling, churning blur of chaos and self-destruction. Jail cells, guys that hit her, self-loathing, criminal behavior. She stole cars. She shot somebody. Her children were taken away. And drugs. Always, there were drugs.
“I asked her what it was like in those days, what she saw when she looked in the mirror. And when she answered, her voice rose and she talked faster and faster, as if the memory was something she was trying to drive from her mind forever. And her words… her words have never left me.When you’re stuck on the street and you smell like feces and you haven’t showered in forever and you can’t make it into a social service during working hours because you’re too busy trying to feed your addiction, and your addiction is bigger than you… and you’ve compromised your integrity a number of times over and over and over again, and you’re starting to be victimized by the people on the street… you’re hopeless. You can’t stand your life. You would rather be dead than alive. I spent most of my addiction wishing that somebody would just blow me away.”
Ginny Burton mugshot. (King County Jail)
Three times she went to state prison. And she says that each time she got clean and had time to think and contemplate what she wanted to change about her life.
It really afforded me the ability to stop and think about what I wanted my life to look like. It gave me the opportunity to let the fog clear.
The problem was that she didn’t have the tools to make that happen, and so she would get out of prison and go back to the same people, the same lifestyle.
“This beast woke up,” she says now. “This beast that was so much bigger than I was. I would tell myself, ‘I am not going to use tomorrow. I am not going to use,’ but at the latest by 2 p.m. the next day I was always using.”
And she describes a “drug vortex” that she could never escape.
When I was clean I thought about using, and when I was using I thought about getting clean.
And so it went, on and on. Her last trip to prison was in 2008. She was in for 33 months, and she stayed clean for six months after she got out. But she relapsed for the umpteenth time and was arrested one last time on Dec. 5, 2012, and she says it saved her life.
She’d been committing forgery crimes in Tacoma and had been up all night, high on meth and heroin. She was heading to Walgreens.
I was in a stolen truck. A really slow one. I pulled out and a cop turned on the lights to pull me over for a light that was out. I took off and he chased me. I almost crashed into a tree in front of an apartment building. And that was it. that was the end.
Ginny Burton mugshot from 2005. (King County Jail)
She recalls sitting in the back of the police car, handcuffed and happy. Relieved.
I knew I was OK. I knew when he put the handcuffs on me and put me in his car, I knew my life was going to change and it was then, in that moment, that I made the decision to turn it around no matter what it took.
Her charges were transferred to King County, and she begged to be put into the Drug Diversion Court program. She went through a treatment program at the Regional Justice Center. She got clean and stayed clean.
Ginny never looked back.
She did social service work for the Post Prison Education Program, and at Lazarus for seven years. And she watched and learned. She told me something that nobody wants to hear. She said that in those seven years, working with hundreds of addicts, she knew of exactly two people who were able to voluntarily get clean and who stayed that way. Two.
And she started going to school.