Kerwin Pittman was eighteen years old when the doors of a North Carolina prison closed behind him. He would not walk free again until he was nearly thirty.
Eleven and a half years. That is how long Pittman spent inside the system — including more than a year in solitary confinement. When he was finally released in 2014, he carried with him something that confinement could not erase: a clear-eyed understanding of what people need when they come home from prison. Not lectures. Not programs designed by people who have never been inside. They need a place to land. A pause. A door that opens instead of locks.
So Pittman did something no formerly incarcerated person in American history had ever done. He bought a prison. The Wayne County Correctional Center in Goldsboro had been abandoned since 2013 — nineteen acres of empty cellblocks and silence. In November 2025, Pittman purchased it for $275,000 through his nonprofit, Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services. Where there were bars, there will be private rooms. Where there was barbed wire, there will be gardens. The facility will house up to 300 residents in a six-month stabilization program, offering trade certifications in plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, and construction — skills in high demand, taught in a place that used to take skills away.
In North Carolina, 44 percent of people released from state prisons are re-arrested within two years. Pittman knows that statistic from the inside. He also knows it is not inevitable. "This is a blueprint for transformation," he says, "led by those who have lived it. From incarceration to ownership."
The renovation will take about two years and an estimated two million dollars. But the work has already begun — not just on the building, but on the idea that the people closest to the problem are often closest to the solution.