Before I was inmate number 1414048, I was Candace Williams.
And long before the system knew my name, I was a little girl whose mother was in and out of prison. I was raised by my grandparents. I told myself over and over again, “I’m not going to end up like my mom.” But cycles don’t just break because we want them to.
In 2008, at 22 years old, I was arrested in Charlottesville. I was already a mother of two beautiful girls and pregnant with my third child. I pleaded guilty for my role in felony murder, two robberies and abduction. It’s a story I’ve told many times over the last few years. Now I want to tell the next part of my story.
Eight months into my incarceration, I gave birth to my son. I was allowed to hold him for four hours. Four hours to memorize his face. Four hours to kiss his forehead. Four hours to be his mother. Then he was taken from me. I was strip-searched and placed back in a cell — alone — with milk still in my body and emptiness in my arms.
What should have been one of the most sacred moments of my life became one of the most traumatic. But even that didn’t wake me up. Not fully. It wasn’t until sentencing day in 2011 that I started to process our generational curse. The judge looked at me and said, “Ms. Williams, I sentenced your mother. Now I’m sentencing you. And most likely, I will sentence your children.”
The time he gave me — 65 years, 47 suspended and 18 active — didn’t shake me to my core. That statement did. Because in that moment, I heard generational trauma being predicted like it was inevitable. When I was first sentenced, I thought the judge was being unfair. But then I realized what he was implying: If I didn’t change the narrative, the narrative would change my children.
When I arrived at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, I met individuals who changed my life. Women who were serving long sentences, women who had lost custody, women who had made mistakes. But they were still mothers. And they showed me something I had forgotten: Incarceration does not erase motherhood.
Last year, the Virginia Department of Corrections held almost 23,000 inmates on average per day. Fewer than 2,000 of those inmates are women, or as many as 3,000 in the last decade according to the VADOC. We are lost in the numbers. From our clothing to prison programming to re-entry, the system is designed for men.