Sharon Skinkis talks to girls incarcerated at Clark County's Department of Juvenile Justice Services on Wednesday as her husband, Dan Skinkis, looks on. The couple have spent more than two decades talking about overcoming drug and alcohol addiction. Photo by Craig L. Moran.

When Sharon Skinkis asks a group of incarcerated girls how many of them have been in recovery programs for substance abuse, about half of the teens raise their hands.

When she asks how many have blacked out after getting high or drunk, again half raise their hands.

"That's addiction, pure and simple," Skinkis tells the group of 12- to 18-year-old girls housed at Clark County's Department of Juvenile Justice Services.

The 57-year-old one-time heroin addict has lived the life she warns against. She was younger than any member of her audience when she first began abusing drugs.

"I was living on the streets of L.A. when I was 11 years old," Skinkis says. "By the time I was 12, I was doing every drug ever invented. Most of my life as a kid was a blackout."

Skinkis has been sober for more than half of her adult life. She and her husband, Dan, a 64-year-old, self-described "garden-variety drunk," have spent more than two decades traveling the country in their battered 1970s pickup, telling their stories at juvenile detention centers, adult prisons and outreach centers, hoping those who hear them get the message: "Don't be me," Sharon Skinkis says.

The couple, who live near Lake Mead and first met 25 years ago in a recovery program, have been recognized for their efforts in Nevada by several politicians including Sen. Harry Reid, social service workers and others. Dan Skinkis this year also received the Jefferson Award, sponsored by a local TV station and Wells Fargo Bank to recognize individuals who perform great public service.

Steven Graham, manager of juvenile detention for the county, has known the couple more than a decade and says the Skinkises "don't pull any punches."

"I think the kids receive the message better coming from somebody who's been there. Unless you've been down in the gutter yourself, you don't know what it means."

The Skinkises don't sugarcoat things just because they're talking to kids. Dan Skinkis tells them he allowed alcoholism to destroy his family before he got sober and met Sharon.

Sharon Skinkis tells the girls about her time spent as a very young prostitute: "Do you need me to tell you how an 11-year-old girl survives on the streets of L.A.?"

She tells the girls about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother.

"One time she came after me with a beer bottle," she says, showing the girls a deep scar on her arm. "She was the kind who'd lock you in the closet for days and not feed you."

Sharon Skinkis says she got sober because she was afraid she would lose her three children, she began blacking out and started looking "like Kermit the Frog."

"I weighed 70 pounds," she says. "Blood vessels in my face had broken. It scared me."

Dan Skinkis hit bottom 27 years ago after realizing that "the addiction has you; you don't have it."

"I wandered into a recovery meeting and it started making me aware. It just wiped me out. I was totally devastated."

The couple say they felt an obligation to try to keep others from making the same mistakes they did.

Years ago, they ran an outreach center for teen addicts in Henderson. But funding for the facility, which came from whatever Sharon Skinkis could talk neighbors and friends into donating, dried up.

The couple also formed a band with some of the teens at one point, and they performed at locations around the state.

"We were really bad," Sharon Skinkis said.

But the teen band mates eventually grew up and decided to move on.

Now, Sharon Skinkis says she is working on a book about her life. Dan Skinkis, a retired construction worker, still works now and then so the couple can afford to spend the rest of their time talking to young people about addiction.

In exchange for their candor at the county facility, the couple get the rapt attention of the girls. The dozen teens, dressed in identical gym clothes, their hair pulled neatly into ponytails, listen intently, especially to Sharon Skinkis' stories.

She tells the girls, who are incarcerated for a range of offenses from theft to drug-related crimes, about one of their peers who passed out while inhaling Freon, burning her lips so badly that she required plastic surgery.

One girl about 15 raises her hand to tell the older woman she has been sober for 30 days.

"I saw a picture of myself when I was first in here, and I looked like crap," the girl says tearfully. "It made me realize I want to change."

The Skinkises say their aim isn't necessarily to scare the girls straight, but instead to let them know they are not alone, to set a good example and to offer them a ray of hope.

"I have a fifth-grade education," Sharon Skinkis tells them. "If I can make something of myself, so can you. Be a cop. Be a lawyer."

"A substance abuse counselor?" one girl asks.

"Yes!" says Sharon Skinkis. "The best substance abuse counselors are former addicts."