Ex-Inmate Buys Prison to Help Others Find Purpose

Kerwin Pittman knows what it's like to leave prison with nowhere to go. After serving 11 and a half years for conspiracy to commit murder, he walked out at age 29 with dreams of helping others avoid his mistakes.

Eight years later, he's making history. Pittman became the first formerly incarcerated person in the United States to purchase a prison, buying the shuttered Wayne County Correctional Center in North Carolina for $275,000 last November.

The vacant jail, closed since 2013, will become the Recidivism Reduction Campus. The facility will house up to 300 residents at a time through a six-month program offering transitional housing, mental health support, workforce training, and industry certifications for in-demand trade jobs.

Pittman founded his nonprofit RREPS (Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services) after his release to serve the Goldsboro community. Over the years, he built an anti-recidivism hotline, mentorship programs, and two mobile resource centers that travel to people in need.

The campus project will cost about $2 million to complete and relies heavily on private donations. Pittman estimates it will take two years to transform the space from confinement to opportunity.

The Ripple Effect

The numbers tell a sobering story. Of the 13,000 people released from North Carolina prisons in 2021, 44% were arrested again within two years.

Pittman had family support when he got out, but many of his friends didn't. They faced time limits on where they could stay or had no place to go at all. That cycle motivates everything he does now.

The transformation will be intentional and symbolic. Barbed wire, prison bars, and signs reading "No inmates allowed past this point" will be removed. Windows into bathrooms will be covered and open dormitories replaced with private rooms that feel more like college dorms than cells.

"This effort is not about continuing incarceration," Pittman told WRAL News. "It is a blueprint for transformation, led by those who have lived it."

The campus represents something bigger than job training. It's proof that investing in people, especially those society has counted out, creates real change. For every person who completes the program, there's a family waiting for their loved one to come home whole and a community that deserves healing.

From a place of punishment to a hub of purpose, one former cell at a time.