A support system for the Triangle's formerly incarcerated residents expanded this week as Recidivism Reduction Educational Programs and Services unveiled their second mobile support center.
The aid-on-wheels program, which began this past January, served 3,000 individuals in its first 70 days, illustrating the "urgent need," the organization said in a statement, for solutions that bring resources directly to those they serve.
"A lot of times, people who are coming home from prison … they don't have transportation," Kerwin Pittman, program's founder and director, said. A longtime advocate for the formerly incarcerated, he spent a little over a decade in prison himself.
"So, when you can bring your services directly into the communities that need it most, it is vital. It is extremely important, and we're filling that gap."
The mobile support center, a midsized black bus adorned with wooden shelves and plush seating, stations at cities across the Triangle to offer services including vocational training, housing support, substance abuse aid, vital records acquisition, and hygiene kit distribution, according to the group, which also goes by the acronym RREPS.
"A third of (recently incarcerated North Carolinians) will return to prisons within three years," North Carolina First Lady Anna Stein said at the event unveiling the new bus. "That's an unacceptably high number."
Stein, who was recently appointed to the state's Joint Reentry Council, said the program supports her mission to improve the rehab and reentry of formerly incarcerated North Carolinians and to decrease the stigma against those struggling with mental health or substance abuse disorders.
"This is very much in lockstep with what I'm interested in," she said. "To see an organization that is trying to directly meet those needs and actually go to people where they are — I'm, very, very happy."
Pittman added that "even if they do have transportation," the need to work during the week might prevent some from returning to a rehab center even if they need help.
That and difficult-to-parse terminology could serve as barriers that other rehab facilities might have struggled to overcome.
The mobile recidivism reduction center, by "speaking in a language that they understood" and "meeting people directly where they are," Pittman said, served to combat those problems.
Once the program rolled out, he said, he was taken aback by how many people leaped to accept the help.
"Shocked" by the difference they made in just 70 days, he hopes to open two more mobile support centers by the end of the year.
