1 in 20 Nurses In Texas Have Arrest Record
It seems the recent demand spike for nurses has resulted in nursing supervisors making $100,000+ per year. Unfortunately it turns out with the rising salaries that the number of felon nurses being hired is also on the rise. 1 in 20 in Texas to be exact.
“A good nursing supervisor, a manager, can make more than $100,000 a year in some cases,” said Devon Herrick, Senior Fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis.
Salaries spiked because of a shortage in the industry. But among the hardworking dedicated nurses are some with questionable backgrounds.
News 8 compared names and dates of births of every currently licensed nurse against the Texas Department of Public Safety criminal database.
The result revealed that thousands of Texas nurses have arrest records. In fact, one in 20 of them have records.
December 18th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Ryan,
Arrest records are not indicative of a person’s wrongdoing. A person is innocent unless proven guilty. Anyone can be arrested even for minor things such as rally demonstration (even though it is peaceful in nature), accusation of violation of restraining order (even though a complaint is made by a vindictive partner/ fatal attraction kind of thing), frivolous complaint of verbal harassment (even though no physical harm has ever made within years of relationship) , over speeding in Georgia, etc. Gosh!
In a post-September 11, 2001 world, the procedures of arresting have changed and even though a charge is about to be dismissed, mandatory arrests have come into place in most states, and I’ve heard that in some states facing budget deficits including the state of NY, NJ, etc, police officers have quotas to meet and therefore crave for arrests and ticket issuing in order to increase revenues. A friend of mine, a retired policeman, told me a story about this poor guy who had a couple of beers and just re-parked his own car from the street to the garage. He has 2 cars and he hit his other car. Unfortunately, he got arrested for property damage, because he passed the breathe test. When the case got to court, only then the judge learned that the other car was his too. Dismissed, but the arrest record is there.
So if your problem in Texas of having 1 out of 20 arrested nurses serving you, I suggest giving them the benefit of the doubt. Conviction is what matters most, not arrest.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:44 am
I am one of those nurses that have a criminal record and it is a felony, my problem is that of theft by check over 1500 dollars, it is a long story about how it got there, but I had the choice of going to jail for a few months and satifying the conviction that way or serving probation and making restitution to the individuals, I choose the latter, because I am not the same person today that wrote those checks which were over 10 years ago, and some how fell through the cracks, I went on about my life and kept trying to live a life that was up right and honest, but now I have this thing hanging over my head, and being made to feel like I am this dirty, fealthy person, I have never in my life, nor will I never hurt anyone, I fight strongly for my patients and I make sure that they are taken care of and never mistreated, the laws are good to protect the elderly, and the mentally retarted, but you can’t just group every individual in the catagory of a felon, I have not raped, killed, physcially harmed anyone in any kind of way, I have never stolen anything from anyone, and I feel that if a person makes full restution on their checks, something by the way that some of our law makers in Austin have done and never had to pay back, and never been labled a liar, theif, or FELON. Thank you for allowing me this space to get this off my chest