(CNN) -- "Get yourself together." Mary Williams repeated those three words often to her 28-year-old daughter, who served three years in a Kansas prison for a 1988 armed robbery. Donnie Belcher, 7, visits her mother, Wanda Taylor, at Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas in 1991. Williams never judged her daughter, Wanda Taylor, for the crime or the crack cocaine addiction that fueled it. There was no need to pick at the past. Instead, Williams looked to the future. The future was her granddaughter, Donnie Belcher, a shy 4-year-old girl with curly hair who cried inconsolably from behind the glass the first time she visited her mother in jail.
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Donnie Belcher's mother was incarcerated when she was 4
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Number of incarcerated mothers exploded 131 percent from 1991 to 2007
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"I wanted to be everything my mother wasn't," Belcher says
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More prisons are creating programs that preserve mother-child relationships
Donnie Belcher
Donnie Belcher
Donnie Belcher
Belcher
@placeholder defied the odds, growing up straight as an arrow despite having a mother in prison.
Mary Williams
Williams
Williams
Belcher's grandmother, @placeholder, stepped in because she didn't want the child in foster care.
Wanda Taylor
Wanda Taylor
Find out what @placeholder and her family learned from her time in prison »
Wanda Taylor
Wanda Taylor
The years after @placeholder's release from prison also were tough on the mother-daughter relationship.
Donnie Belcher
Donnie Belcher
Donnie Belcher
Belcher
As an adolescent, @placeholder battled feelings of bitterness toward her mother and feared her mother would relapse.