Nancy Adams grew comfortable sharing her Compton townhome during the COVID-19 pandemic when she rented spare bedrooms to traveling nurses.
Still, it was a long leap of faith to open her home to her current house guest — a paroled murderer.
Adams, 72, had retired from a career in banking but still relishes her backup job, tending bar at Crypto.com Arena.
“I try to keep it exciting,” she said. “What’s the point of waking up?”
But it was something deeper — a mixture of Christian faith, a familial experience with incarceration, a touch of loneliness — that drew her to the post on social media seeking homes for former inmates.
“The thought of what I had read wouldn’t leave me alone.”
After mulling it over a week, Adams responded. In October, she became a host for the Homecoming Project, a prison reentry program that turns private homes into transitional housing for men and women during their first year out of prison.
Adams, who had accepted her brother back into her home after more than a decade of estrangement and cared for him through his final years, was intuitively aligned with the mission.
“This is a great thing,” she said. “They didn’t have anything like this when my brother was in and out of prison.”
Given profiles of three prospects, her choice was easy.
After 29 years in prison and a stint in a halfway house, Nicholas Nabors moves into a bedroom of his own.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
A loner who spent most days in his room didn’t feel right. A smoker was a hard no.
The third might have seemed the least likely fit. Nicholas Nabors murdered a convenience store clerk during a robbery when he was 16. He was paroled after serving just under 30 years of a 34-year to life sentence.
But there was something about him that appealed to Adams. He had earned an AA degree and thrived in his work in prison making DMV tags. He had met his fiancee through prison correspondence. He had a job on a maintenance crew with the California Department of Transportation.
“His core seems to be good, a person who has dreams and vision and hope to move his life forward,” she said. “He just needs a little assistance to do that.”
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The Oakland-based Homecoming Project was launched in 2018 by the national nonprofit Impact Justice, whose mission is investing in community-based models of justice reform.
The Homecoming Project has placed 157 former inmates in Bay Area homes. After their six-month stays, none of the 37 who have so far graduated has returned to prison.
With a grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and funds from the California Workforce Development Board, the Homecoming Project branched out to Los Angeles earlier this year. Adams was the fifth volunteer to answer its call. Currently the program is serving six former inmates, two have graduated and six more are signed up to begin in January.
The project is funded to add more than 80 participants next year, up to half in Los Angeles, seeking to provide a model for addressing the high rate of post-incarceration homelessness.
A study by the Prison Policy Institute found that about 2% of formerly incarcerated people were homeless. That’s about three times the rate for the general population in Los Angeles County and 10 times the national rate and means that the prison system could be adding hundreds of people a year to the state’s homeless population.
Homecoming Project director Bernadette Butler acknowledges that the scale of the effort so far is not going to provide a significant alternative to the system of group homes contracted by the state to support the reentry of 35,000 to 40,000 inmates released from California prisons annually.
She sees it as a demonstration.
“We are showing the world what is possible.”
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Nabors had no immediate family to turn to when he was released. He was prohibited from contacting his younger brother, who had joined him in the fatal robbery, and strongly advised by the parole board to stay away from his mother, who gave him the gun used in the robbery and then made national news by testifying against him in his trial.
Paroled to Los Angeles, he spent 90 days in a drug rehabilitation program near MacArthur Park. Even though, he said, addiction was not a problem he completed the program as required and then moved to a transitional home in South Los Angeles.
After six months, his funding from the state STOP program expired, and he had to start paying $750 rent for a shared room.
At a low point, he turned to the Los Angeles office of the Center for Employment Opportunities, one of four organizations that partner with the Homecoming Project. They got him the Caltrans job, and a staffer saw his potential and referred him to the Homecoming Project.
Three months later, Nabors moved into the four-bedroom home in a gated community just east of Compton City Hall. On move-in day, he and Adams exchanged thoughts on what brought them together and what might come of it.
“I don’t have to live in a house by myself anymore,” Adams said. “That’s a good thing.”
Nicholas Nabors moves into a bedroom with help from Ashley McKay, left, a program associate with the Homecoming Project.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Her own experience with redemption also surfaced.
“The part of my life of being a Christian, a practicing Christian, you got to step out of your comfort zone and do something differently,” she said.
She did when her brother showed up and asked for forgiveness.
“You know sincerity when you see it,” she said. “He apologized for all the things he did to us as a family.”
She let him in and cared for him the last four and a half years of his life as he died of renal disease.
“That freed me up tremendously. I don’t think I would be doing this if my brother hadn’t done that.”
Nabors articulated his hope for the program as if he had already experienced it.
“It put me in normal environment,” he said. “It allowed me to live with someone who wasn’t system orientated, they weren’t going to look at me necessarily as an inmate, that I was going to be treated as a normal person. I was going to have freedom and have the space to grow and figure out exactly who I was outside of prison. Traditional programs don’t necessarily do that.”
A month later, both described an evolving relationship that was closer to roommates than landlord-tenant. They don’t spend a lot of time together. He leaves for work in the morning, she leaves for her job before he returns.
“The thing with Nick is he’s just such a cool guy and he’s easy to talk to,” Adams said.
More reflective than on day one, Nabors delved into his own journey.
“I did something horrible at 16, and for the next 30 years, whenever I tried to identify myself, the picture that they had was at 16. It’s a fistfight, it’s a brawl, to get anyone to see you as anything other than that.
“And for me, I mean, it’s been a struggle, but at this point, I feel like it’s empowering for me just to embrace it.”
Nabors’ self-awareness is not the exception for Homecoming Project clients, Butler said. All must have done at least 10 years, giving them time to reflect and to complete three required rehabilitation programs. Many have had life sentences reduced — a subgroup that has a recidivism rate under 3%, the lowest of all released prisoners.
The parole process, in which only 14% of petitions are granted, is “an incredible first layer of screening,” Butler said.
Candidates are further screened informally by parole officers and staff at partner organizations such as the Center for Employment Opportunities who make referrals.
In the balance between clients and hosts, there are always more clients, Butler said.
“There’s never going to be a shortage of people leaving prison. Our growth is contingent on recruiting hosts.”
To compensate them, the Homecoming Project provides a stipend of $8,600 for the six months. To make the best match, it also preps potential hosts with every detail of their future guest’s past including psychological assessments of their future criminal behavior from their time in prison.
Nabors’ profile had one complication in that he was engaged. But that was also a strong point. He credits much of the character development to their nine years of correspondence.
“People kind of discredit the idea that you have a relationship in prison,” he said. “Well, the truth is that you communicate more when you’re in prison, because that’s all that you have. I challenge any guy to tell me that he’s written his wife a 37-page letter, right, and that you’ve read her 35-page letter in return and took time to literally go line by line and understand what she was saying and then respond to what she was saying, not necessarily how you felt.”
He said writing through his emotions, and reading through hers, caused him to reflect in a much deeper way.
“What am I angry about? So I have to go back. I have to read her letter. OK, what did you say to make me feel so mad? But in that, what we’re doing is that we’re practicing active listening.”
Now, she and her teenage daughter are welcome guests on weekends. Once the six-month program ends, Nabors plans to work with her building a business to operate transitional housing for ex-prisoners.
Nabors and his fiancee, whose privacy he asked to be respected, married Nov. 11 in a ceremony attended by his former supervisor at the Prison Industry Authority but not his mother.
Nicholas Nabors looks out a window as he moves into a bedroom of his own in Compton.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“I’ve atoned for those things. I’ve done my time. I’ve explored my life. I’ve gained insight and all those things that we need to do in order to become a better person. My mother hasn’t done that.”
Adams took a longer view.
“I know it’s not a good thing right now, right? You know what I’m saying, but at some point before he leaves this earth, he gonna want to see that woman.”