Elizabeth Shatswell: A Journey from Darkness to Advocacy

A Fifth-Grade Reading Level Behind Bars

When Elizabeth Shatswell was tested for educational competency after arriving at the Savannah Correctional Center for Women, the results were crushing. “I tested at a fifth grade level,” she told me. She’d been passed through multiple schools, five elementary schools, three middle schools in two years across three states, before dropping out in her junior year. “I could barely read and write,” she said. “I did know math because I knew how to count money.”

Elizabeth’s story isn’t one you hear often. At 17, she received a 55-year sentence for a non-lethal, first-time offense involving carjacking. After serving nearly 23 years, she was granted juvenile parole in 2023. But what happened between sentencing and release shows how someone can transform themselves even in the most restrictive environment.

The Night That Changed Everything

Elizabeth was working part-time at Michael’s Arts and Crafts as a floor manager when her co-defendant showed up with an invitation. “There’s a hotel party. Do you want to go?” she recounted. “I said, sure.” She was also working as a stripper part-time at the time. What she thought would be a party became something else entirely when they got in her boss’s car.

“At that point in time, it became a car jacking,” Elizabeth explained. “Her car was taken forcefully.” Elizabeth is direct about her responsibility: “I don’t agree that I should have received the sentence that I received. But I do agree that I should have been incarcerated. There should be accountability, you know?”

The legal process moved fast and without adequate representation. Elizabeth met with her public defender once before court for a total of five minutes. When she pled guilty thinking she was accepting juvenile life, which in Virginia meant incarceration until age 21 with possible release by 23, Judge Henry Hudson, nicknamed “Hang ‘em High Hudson,” refused the plea deal and sentenced her to 55 years instead.

Eighteen Months in a Closet

Elizabeth spent her first 18 months in isolation, initially in a cell she describes as six by five feet with a cot and no mattress. “Like a closet,” she said. Part of that extended stay was due to her own behavior, she didn’t want to leave isolation after the trauma of sentencing.

When she finally moved to general population at age 18, the reception was mixed. Some officers wanted to mother her because she was so young. Others took the opposite approach: “Oh, you think you’re grown. We’re going to treat you like you’re grown,” she remembered one saying. The prevailing mentality was that if you messed up once, “you’re going to be a mess up forever.”

Elizabeth found herself in maximum security, cooking for 1,800 people on the midnight shift. “I still love to cook and bake,” she said, “but I still don’t know portion control” after years of preparing institutional meals.

Finding Teachers Who Believed

Two educators changed Elizabeth’s trajectory inside. Gary Hayden, a special education teacher, had Elizabeth retested for learning disabilities and put her on an individualized education plan. It took a year and a half to complete her first college class, algebra. “The worst thing to say,” Elizabeth laughed, but she worked as a tutor for Hayden for the next 10 years.

“She was the first person to believe in me,” Elizabeth said about Hayden. The second was Nancy Archie, who taught print technologies and graphic design. “Miss Archie is the first person who taught me how to listen and to realize that every choice I make has an implication.”

Education inside came with strings attached. In Virginia, behavior was tied to educational access, one infraction, no matter how small, could cost you your place in a program. Out of 1,800 women, only 36 had access to associate degree programs at one point. Elizabeth’s first associate degree took 10 years to complete.

Building Programs From Nothing

Elizabeth’s ability to navigate between different groups, what she calls “clicks”, gave her a unique position to create programming. The Voice Project started as a poetry writing group led by a volunteer, providing a safe space to process trauma in an environment where everything was subject to search and surveillance.

“Anything that you write can be used against you,” Elizabeth explained. “Everything is recorded and can be used against you. So some people have traumatic incidents but need outlet to have safe space to talk about them.”

The poetry group evolved into theatrical performances, including adaptations of “Our Town” set in prison and “The Wiz,” where Elizabeth played the Wicked Witch. “We didn’t have any costumes,” she said. “I’m wearing like trash bags. And then I die on stage and roll off backwards. I’m such a klutz.”

Elizabeth also co-founded Stop, Drop, and Yoga, and later the Hope Team, an evolving partnership between Department of Corrections staff and incarcerated individuals focused on community-based healthcare practices.

The Long Wait for Freedom

Virginia changed its juvenile sentencing laws, making Elizabeth eligible for parole after 20 years. Her lawyer told her after she made parole that her chances had been 0.001%. The wait for her transfer to be closer to her biological family in Washington state took four and a half years, not months, years, during which her grandmother passed away.

Now, six months after release, Elizabeth is finishing her bachelor’s degree in May and has multiple associates and vocational degrees. She’s setting up webinars with her former teachers and reconnecting with family. “It’s just one day at a time,” she said about reentry. “It feels like you’re jumping in a moving car and you’re trying to catch up with everybody.”

Elizabeth’s story illustrates both the failures and possibilities within the system. A child who entered prison barely literate became an educator and program developer. Her transformation didn’t happen despite the system, it happened because a few people inside it chose to see potential where others saw only a case number.