Rudy Carey was on his way to get drugs in the summer of 2004 when he got pulled over because the light over his license plate was broken. He’d been struggling with addiction for the 16 years since his father had died, and had racked up enough fines that he’d lost his driver's license. So when the officer gave him a ticket, he signed it under a fake name — then started struggling as the officer tried to arrest him.
The struggle turned into a sloppy punch that landed Carey, then 34, in a Virginia state prison on multiple charges, including assault and battery of a police officer. When he got out in 2007, he decided to forge a different path, using his broken past to help other people.
For five years, Carey worked as a drug counselor at a rehab center in Fredericksburg, juggling high caseloads and even winning a counselor of the year award. It all fell apart in 2018 when the center’s new owners realized that state law barred him from being a drug counselor because of his 14-year-old criminal record. They fired him.
“I felt like my life had just been taken away,” Carey told me.
Carey was facing one of thousands of “collateral consequences,” punishments that last long after people have served their sentences. In many states, people with certain criminal records can’t serve on juries or become foster parents. Most of the more than 40,000 collateral consequences on the books, though, apply to employment.
Sometimes those laws directly prevent people from getting the licensing...
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