Root & Rebound
Bandaging the Past: Reyna’s Journey to Reclaim Her Nursing Dream
Pursuing a career in healthcare with a criminal record
Reyna always wanted to be a nurse for as long as she could remember. As a child, she waited in the living room for her dad to arrive from work. She could make out the rumble of his work truck as he pulled into the driveway. He would open the door, and her nose could make out whiffs of freshly cut grass with remnants of dirt from tilling the ground. She would tread her feet across the furry carpet and jump into her father’s arms. Immediately after, she would ask to see his hands. The eight-year-old Reyna could see etched-out grooves beneath his fingernails and small cuts that marbled his fingers. Her legs would spring into action to retrieve alcohol and clean out the dirt and blood from his hands to make sure Dad was okay. She carefully covered each cut with tiny bandaids. Little Reyna was her dad’s personalized caretaker — this was where her dream of becoming a nurse started.
It had been some time since she last visited those memories. It was nice to think of the days when the family unit was cohesive and her parents admired her, but that was ages ago. She was now entering her 40s and the dream of becoming a nurse had come to a stop. It wasn’t a conscious choice to put that dream behind her, but she was aware of the limitations she had as one of the estimated 8 million Californians living with a criminal record (Californians for Safety and Justice).
It was only a little over a year ago that Reyna made her way through prison gates and entered the free world after being incarcerated for nearly seven years. From one day to the next, she woke up in a place where she was no longer told what to do, where to go, what she could wear, what to eat, and when she could wake up. She missed nothing about prison and was excited to put that part of her life behind her. She was ready to start over.
Being Released
The first few weeks after incarceration were foreign, but with time, freedom became more familiar. Reyna learned how to use a phone again and adjusted to having a computer in her palm. Noticing that most things were done online, she worked on her resume and began looking up jobs right away. She had done her share of manual labor while housed at a prison fire camp serving as a firefighter. It was intense work that paid very little — a mere eighty cents an hour to risk her life and work for weeks in dense forests, but it helped her earn additional time credits to reduce her sentence. More importantly, she learned how to operate a chainsaw at the fire camp. The rigorous training and sense of responsibility empowered her to take control of her decisions and carve her path forward. For the first time, she felt in control of her life. Holding onto the lessons from the fire camp, Reyna dived into the job search with determination.
Reyna was incredible at working with people, so she applied for retail and customer service jobs. However, looking for employment wasn’t as easy as she imagined. Her interviewing skills were exceptional. The interviewers would finish with promising remarks, saying she’d make a valuable addition to the team and that she’d be a perfect fit for the job. However, their kindness and responsiveness to emails would go away the moment they received the results of her background check. Unfortunately, employers refused to see past her record.
After several denials, thoughts began to race through her mind. Why did they say no? Although she had a second chance, could she actually do anything she wanted? How would she support herself? She lived in a transitional home that provided shelter, but what would she do when her time was up? Her family was quite a distance away because she had to relocate, so how would she visit her children? It was in moments like these that Reyna realized her past was not necessarily forgiven or forgotten. Instead, it would be by her side like an unwanted shadow, following her at every turn, every job application, every instance where someone asked where she had been the past decade.
“I did struggle a little bit looking for a job because I was confronted with getting the background check — failing a background check, initially, when I first got out. So I realized that right then and there that might be an obstacle.”
Moving Past the Struggle
Rejection made adjusting that much more difficult. Reyna encountered what many others do in their reentry journey — barriers. Research estimates that there are 48,000 collateral consequences of incarceration (The Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology), and Reyna was not immune to their effects. She quickly pivoted and applied for work in the food industry, eventually landing a job at a local deli. When it came to jobs requiring physical labor, her record didn’t seem to matter as much. It was confusing, but she didn’t dwell on it because she needed the work hours. She worked at the deli for days, then weeks, and eventually months. Although she appreciated the job, her heart secretly longed for something more.
As she picked up plates and wiped down tables, Reyna moved around the deli, recalling memories of her life before prison — bandaging her father’s wounds and attending nursing school. Becoming a nurse still had a place in her heart and the idea of being able to get her license was not gone altogether; she just didn’t know it at the time.
In her earlier years, Reyna completed all of the necessary classes while attending nursing school. The only step left was to apply for the National Council Licensure Examination. According to the Board of Registered Nursing, also known as the Board, having a conviction didn’t automatically disqualify someone. While it did make the process more challenging and put her moral character under scrutiny, they also considered an individual’s rehabilitation. Reyna began rummaging her brain for ideas.
While incarcerated, she remembered hearing some of the girls talk about getting their records cleaned. She didn’t fully understand what it meant then, but now that she was encountering circumstances where her record was holding her back, she decided to look into it. This is how she encountered Root & Rebound (R&R).
Working with an attorney at R&R, she discovered that she was immediately eligible to apply for expungement because she had served part of her sentence at a fire camp (AB 2147). Other important bills, like SB 731, that make certain convictions “expungeable,” further widened her opportunity to obtain record-cleaning relief. They worked on her petition, submitted it, and waited. It felt surreal. She pushed aside the possibility of becoming a nurse, believing that her record had closed off any pathway back to it. She was nervous because having the petition granted didn’t guarantee she would receive her license. It merely allowed her to apply for licensure, but Reyna was okay with that. After several weeks in limbo, a judge reviewed her petition and granted her expungement in the interest of justice.
“It was almost liberating, like I could leave that in my past…. And that’s where I remember coming to a conclusion, like maybe this is something that I should leave in my past. Maybe my record and my felony conviction is something that I never have to bring up again in my life.”
The next step was going to be the toughest part: applying to the California Board of Registered Nursing to take her exam for licensure. It was scary knowing that her future, her dream, lay in the hands of others. She understood they would dig into her past and begin questioning her moral character and whether she was suitable to be a nurse. As she waited for their decision, she began thinking about what one of her friends said to her while in prison:
“Just for a time, say yes. Say yes to anything you say yes to. Whether it’s something different, trying something different, just say yes to it and you never know what can be”
Somewhere deep inside this is what Reyna did — she said yes to the outcome. Whether good or bad, she permitted herself to hope for something new even if that hope might shatter her heart. But her heart never did get shattered. The board decided to let her take the exam. They, too, had said yes.
Dreams Becoming a Reality
For many others who transition from incarceration to the free community, there is a sense of wanting to redeem themselves with their second opportunity in life, and Reyna was no different. She knew she made a mistake and accepted accountability for her actions. She served out her prison sentence and successfully completed parole. Today, she’s knee-deep in textbooks, one step from making her dream a reality; passing that exam would officially license her to work as a nurse in California.
In the upcoming decade of the 2030s, there is an estimated shortage of nearly 200,000 nurses and 124,000 physicians (The Hill). While record cleaning and Fair Chance laws are not perfect, they allow some individuals a second opportunity to rebuild their lives and fill this gap.
Having the opportunity to redeem herself is what kept Reyna grounded. Most importantly, she wanted to be proud of her transformation and ultimately learn to forgive herself. She also hoped to make her parents proud because, for years, they had been ashamed of their daughter’s mistakes. Reyna also sought to be a model of transformation for the individuals stuck in prison and to fight against the pressure that’s put on people, particularly women, when they make a mistake.
“I think that’s a misconception — is that we’re all stereotyped that we can never break that cycle… that we’re criminals and we’re just bound to make a mistake again.”
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