Eric Boehm takes an in-depth look at how licensing laws that block people with criminal records from employment can harm the formerly incarcerated, weaken the economy, and lead to even more crime:
When the state of Illinois turned Carlos Romero’s life upside down in 2013, he had been out of prison for more than 20 years.
He had done two years at the Western Illinois Correction Center for attempted murder. His conviction, in 1991, was for shooting another young man during an alternation in the streets of his poor Chicago neighborhood the year prior. He ended up serving less than half of his six-year sentence, released early for good behavior and put on probation. That was small consolation to the then-22-year old Romero, who recalls that getting out of prison felt like having “an out-of-body feeling I couldn’t shake.”
His conviction had ended his dreams of getting out of Chicago and seeing the world. When he reported to the Western Illinois Correction Center on April 15, 1991—a date Romero says he’ll never forget—it was less than a year after he’d finished his GED and signed up to join the military. Leaving the same prison during the summer of 1993, he felt like “everything and everyone had changed.”
Romero got to work putting his life back together, trying to escape the mistake that would continue to stalk him for the next two decades. He lived with his sister for a while, and like many former convicts, he struggled to find work. He was in his early 20s, with little meaningful work experience, no college degree, and a criminal record. It was months before he landed a gig with a temp agency doing translation, and he worked his way from there into a variety of manufacturing jobs, allowing him to eventually live on his own.
By 2010, when Romero began studying to become a respiratory therapist—a medical professional who works with patients suffering from a wide range of lung diseases or recovering from injury or surgery—he had been a free man for 17 years and for the first time felt like he’d found a true calling. A year later he started working at St. Bernard Hospital in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. “It did my heart well to see patients that I helped take care of walk out of the ICU,” he says.
“He was an excellent therapist. Very nice, very personable,” says Doug McQueary, who ran the respiratory therapy program at St. Bernard’s during Romero’s time working there. Now retired, McQueary says Romero was upfront about the felony conviction on his record but had worked hard to turn his life around. “I admired him,” McQueary says.
Just as Romero was settling into his new job, the Illinois state legislature passed a law that would punish him a second time for the crime he’d committed two decades earlier. A Chicago Tribune investigation had found that 16 licensed doctors and nurses in Illinois were on the state’s list of sex offenders. In response, the legislature passed an absolute lifetime ban on licensing for any doctors, nurses, therapists, and other health care professionals convicted of any forcible felony. The ban applied not only to new applicants but to all current license holders.
The law was passed in 2011. Romero had his license revoked in 2013.
“I honestly thought it was a paperwork mis-shuffle, because I followed all the guidelines in legally obtaining my license,” including telling the licensing board about his time in prison, Romero says. After realizing that it was for real, he told administrators at St. Bernard’s and at another hospital where he was working part-time about the situation, hired a lawyer, prepared to fight.
But there was nothing he could really do. The law was clear. He had a forcible felony on his record, so he could no longer do the job that made Romero feel, for the first time since before his conviction, like he was making a positive difference in peoples’ lives. His license was revoked and his job was gone. “I was floored, stunned, numb,” he says. “I was not worthy of a second chance, a fresh start.
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