The sprawling yellow house with the red trim has an air hockey table in the living room and framed Christmas photos on the walls. With five bedrooms, an airy kitchen and a lemon tree in the backyard, the home in Oakland, Calif., is perfect for a large family.
Or several convicts just released from prison.
Over the past three years, a rotation of recently released inmates, many of them convicted of murder, has cycled through the home of Surmiche Vaughn, 42, and her husband, Scott Patterson, 47. The houseguests are part of a program run by an Oakland nonprofit trying to keep former prisoners off the street.
Overall, 24 men have stayed with the couple, usually five or so at a time.
In return for hosting the men, Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson receive about $1,500 per tenant per month, payments that are covered by the nonprofit, Impact Justice.
The experimental initiative is one of the few of its kind in the nation. It operates in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and all of its participants are coming off prison sentences of 10 years or longer, most commonly for murder, but also for attempted murder, manslaughter and robbery. Some 130 hosts have taken in prisoners since the program started in 2018.
Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson know that their decision has raised eyebrows, even among loved ones.
“At first our friends were like, ‘You’re doing what? Girl, what?’” said Ms. Vaughn, who goes by Memi.
Having ex-convicts in the community has caused some anxiety among the neighbors. Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson admit that they were initially apprehensive as well. What if it invited disruption or violence into their home?
One of Ms. Vaughn’s 21-year-old twin daughters at first avoided staying at the house when she visited from college, Ms. Vaughn said. She came around about a year ago, and now invites her friends over.
But Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson say that hosting the men has largely gone off without a hitch.
Years in prison have taught the former convicts to be on good behavior so as not to risk a return, said Ms. Vaughn, who owns and runs a massage therapy business in Oakland. The house is quieter and cleaner than when her twins were still living at home, she said with a chuckle, and the rent money goes straight toward the children’s college tuition.
The men mostly just want a chance to move forward, said Mr. Patterson, who works as a hospital X-ray technician.
“They’re not going to do anything to compromise that,” he said.
Philippe Kelly, 43, spent more than two decades in prison for a fatal shooting he committed when he was a teenager. He moved in with Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson in 2023.
He said it was a tough adjustment back to the real world after so many years in an environment that “disconnects you from society, it disconnects you from relationships, and it disconnects you from your humanity.”
Mr. Kelly, who now works as an organizer at a nonprofit promoting civil rights and criminal justice reform, said Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson had treated him like a friend and let him adjust on his own timeline.
“There’s a lot to be said about folks who open their home up to strangers and allow them the opportunity to reacclimate into society without any pressure, without any judgment, and just with open arms and love,” he said.
There are occasional problems within the program, known as the Homecoming Project. Sometimes participants don’t get along with their hosts, or break house rules, such as curfews, quiet hours and bans on alcohol and smoking. Impact Justice will occasionally relocate participants to homes that would be a better fit, and in rare cases have discharged people from the program, said Bernadette Butler, who leads the program for Impact Justice.
To match released prisoners with hosts, Impact Justice, which is funded by state grants as well as several family foundations, gets referrals from probation and parole officers and then screens and interviews potential candidates. They are looking for people who want to transform their lives. Anyone convicted of sex crimes is excluded.
In California, people are typically released from prison with $200. During those early days, they’re highly susceptible to falling back into old ways, becoming homeless or using drugs, said Reuben Jonathan Miller, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies incarceration.
Having a safe place to land and the care of people who don’t treat them as criminals can be transformative, he said.
Impact Justice pays for tenants to live with families for six months, and the recidivism rate for the program’s roughly 290 participants in that time is zero, the organization said. Most participants finish their home stay with full-time employment.
Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson for the most part haven’t told their neighbors about their houseguests, saying they think the men should be free to share their pasts on their own terms. Some neighbors were not pleased to learn about the program from a reporter.
Yuhna Del Rosario, 32, who rents the home next door, said it made her nervous. “Oh, hell no,” she said. “They’re very brave.”
A few doors down, Leticia Rivera, 69, initially expressed similar unease. Crime had decreased in the neighborhood since she moved there in the 1990s, she said, and she bristled at anything that could threaten that.
She was quiet for a few minutes as she watered the tomatoes and squash plants in her front yard, and then acknowledged that there hadn’t been any problems for the neighborhood thus far, so maybe it was OK after all.
“Everybody deserves a second chance,” Ms. Rivera said.
Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson began accepting tenants from Impact Justice in 2023 after encouragement from Ms. Vaughn’s father, Surville Vaughn, who had hosted tenants in his three-bedroom apartment, also in east Oakland.
Mr. Vaughn, 76, has hosted more released prisoners than any other homeowner in the program. He said he hadn’t had issues with tenants stealing or doing drugs. Sometimes there are minor problems, he said, like when a tenant is playing music too loudly, but all have been easily remedied.
The program focuses on people who’ve completed long sentences because they are often most disconnected from their loved ones, and also tend to have lower recidivism rates. One recent tenant of Ms. Vaughn’s had recently completed a 43-year sentence.
It takes some time for the men to adjust. On his first night, one tenant fell asleep still wearing his boots and backpack with the door to his bedroom open.
When Ms. Vaughn talked with him the next morning, he said that he wasn’t accustomed to having privacy after so many years of not having any. He also said he was uncomfortable in a bedroom that felt so much larger than a prison cell. He soon moved into the home’s smallest bedroom, which felt more familiar.
Ms. Vaughn said that was the first time she was home alone with a tenant — her husband was out of town — and one of only two times she has felt some anxiety.
The second occurred when she learned two men from rival L.A. gangs would be living in her house. “Then I was surprised because they were the ones that got along the most,” she said, adding that they had ended up bonding over shared experiences and what had happened decades ago. “A lot of that stuff is behind them.”
Helping the men with this major transition and learning about their struggles have made the couple’s own problems feel quotidian, Ms. Vaughn said.
“They’ve shaped me to be a better partner to my husband, a better person,” she said. “I’m able to stop and smell the roses.”
They try to make the tenants feel normal and included in their lives. Mr. Patterson plays video games and watches basketball with some of the tenants, and listens to tales of their pasts. Ms. Vaughn takes them grocery shopping and gives them advice about women.
The men cook and clean for themselves. But every Thanksgiving, Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson hosts a lunch in which they invite their family and friends, as well as all former and current tenants.
Mr. Kelly has since moved out, but he calls the couple once a week to check in. Mr. Patterson said he felt like a “proud parent” the first time that Mr. Kelly excitedly FaceTimed them from his new apartment.
Frank Dryden, 50, was released from prison last year after serving 13 years for shooting two people in a robbery. He said living with Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Patterson helped him stick to a commitment he made to himself while he was in prison: to stay out of trouble.
He has gotten a job with the state picking up trash on the side of the highway, and started volunteering with a local church to deliver food to needy people.
“Either that or go back out here on the streets and hang out with the people I used to hang out with, and do what I used to do,” he said.
Jesse Barron contributed reporting, and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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