Kerwin Pittman’s journey from inmate to buying a prison

More than 18,000 people are released from North Carolina’s prisons each year. Every day, newly-released inmates have no place to stay and no means to find gainful employment.
Kerwin Pittman knows all about the challenges of re-entry. Pittman spent the first 11 years of his adult life incarcerated. Now, eight years after his release, Pittman has purchased a prison, with plans to transform the facility into a site of restoration and reform. 

Pittman is the Founder and Executive Director of Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services, Inc. (RREPS) and owner of the former Wayne Correctional Center in Goldsboro.  
This is a partial transcription of Pittman’s conversation with Due South Host, Leoneda Inge.

Inge: As they say, and as I keep reading and hearing, you’re the first formerly incarcerated person in the United States to purchase a prison. To ask what inspired you to purchase this prison or undertake this great endeavor. I don’t even know where to begin, Kerwin? I almost want to begin with you growing up in southeast Raleigh. Do you not like to think about what sent you to prison in the first place?

Pittman: Yes, I think about what sent me to prison in the first place, and then I also think about now, on this side of things. How can I combat other people from going inside of prison based on the path that I went down. Knowing and having that lived experience has really been the secret sauce to my success and my programming success and pouring it into directly impacted people to do the same thing and go back and beat down the path that they once went down and maybe drove them into prison.

It’s been a ton of work we’ve been doing, but I think about it all the time, all the time.

Inge: You spent eleven years there, but also time in solidary confinement. I’m told you were getting your mind right, you were getting your life right while you were there.

Pittman: Throughout the course of my incarceration, I did close to 1,000 days total, in different intervals. My longest stint in solidary confinement was 365 days, I did a year in the hole. A space that’s the size of a small bathroom or a small parking space. It took me to have an epiphany moment after several months. Ok, Kerwin, you have to really wake-up and do something different. So, it was at that moment I began to see serving time.

I like to tell people, let the time serve me. I treated it like college. It was an institution of higher learning for me. One of the places that was dismal, that was dark, that is heavy, that is gloomy, people around me are screaming all the time or getting maced or different things of that nature. I turn it into my room of knowledge, of growing, of exploring who Kerwin Pittman was.

Inge: At 18, what did you do to even be sent to prison?

Pittman: So, it was a fight that actually turned into a shooting. Of course, as youth, we kind of had rival neighborhoods and we fight. We went over there to fight and it actually turned into a shooting. And though I’d never even fired a shot but because I was on the scene, I ended up doing eleven and a half years.
But the way I look at it is, it was just my past catching up to me. I understand and I know that Kerwin Pittman did some things that he did get away with. One thing I know about it for Kerwin Pittman, and I know in my life is that I cannot outrun my karma. My karma, it catches up to me and so now I put out good positive energy.

Inge: I feel it too, Kerwin. I feel it in the studio! So now you’re home. What you were feeling and thinking when you were incarcerated, the good thing, you had a family to go back home to, and a lot of people do not.

Pittman: They do not. I had a great family support system. I had my mother, my father, my brother. I had a big extended family on both sides of my family. But my core, my crutch was my immediate family and they supported me.

My mother, I would never forget, supported me tooth and nail, right or wrong. But she would tell me if I was wrong. But she still would say, okay Kerwin, we got to help you figure this out. And so, she was the mother, and still is, would draw on the envelopes when she would send mail in to me. I would long for those envelopes especially when I was in the hole. I would get her pictures. She would spray her perfume on the actual pages. I would smell the perfume and think about my mother. It was things like that, that my mother was and still is a great supporter of the work that I am doing. So, for her to see and my family to see the transition from me once a wild child to now being this successful young man who has really transitioned his life, turned his life around and being a beacon of hope for other people is a blessing.

Inge: So, you grew up in Raleigh. You live in Raleigh today. What made you drive down the road to Goldsboro? I’m trying to figure out how you felt when you saw this boarded up, fenced up, closed, shutdown, eyesore of a former correctional center?

Pittman: This isn’t my first prison. I actually acquired another prison, but the deal fell through when we realized that it was owned by DOT, and DOT did not want to honor the deal.

Inge: Who was that?

Pittman: The Department of Transportation. It was actually Guess Road prison in Durham. I was actually gifted it by then Secretary of DPS, Secretary Buffaloe (NC Department of Public Safety Secretary Eddie Buffaloe retired December 2025) I was going to transform it, of course, not to the scale of what we are doing now, but more so to an office of violence prevention type mechanism. Violence prevention for Durham.

So, when it came to the one in Goldsboro, it was kind of God sent. And I am going to tell you why. When the deal fell through with DOT, with Guess Road, that made me then start my mobile centers. And so I have mobile centers that go across the state to help people get a ton of different resources and things they need. When we circled back around and I see that Wayne Correctional was for sale I actually toured it.

I told myself, and I am very spiritually inclined, and I said God if it is for me it is going to be for me and I am going to feel it when I go in. When I walked in there I did not feel no malice. It was dusty, birds had taken over. My team was looking at me like, what in the world are you about to do? You got us walking through this dusty place. Birds flapping around, they are running out! I could see people walking around. I’d seen the vision. I see people when it was a prison, I see people walking around free. I was like, this is it.

So, I started negotiating with the state. And I said, God, I am not going to go up more on my negotiations. If this is for me, this is for me and they are going to accept this offer.

Inge: How much did you have to pay for it?

Pittman: So, I paid $275,000.

Inge: You can’t even get a house, not around here. I’m going to put this on the record, they should have given it to you for free.

Pittman: A lot of people have said that. The goal is hopefully to transform this space so where the next one, they will give it to me free. This is not the only one. This will be a part of Kerwin Pittman’s legacy, not only for North Carolina but across the country.

You can hear more of this ‘Due South’ interview with Kerwin Pittman here.