“Inside Out” by Keri Blakinger is a partnership between NBC News and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal justice system. The column draws on Blakinger’s unique perspective as an investigative journalist and formerly incarcerated person.
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 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 — and 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 faced one of thousands of “collateral consequences,” punishments that last long after people have served their sentences. In many...
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