By the time a young person is deeply caught up in drugs, offending, or exclusion from school, the story has usually been unfolding for years. The signs may have been there early: disconnection, anger, shame, poverty, family stress, or the simple absence of someone steady enough to keep showing up.
That does not mean the path is fixed. Nor does it mean we can explain offending or addiction with one neat cause. People make choices, and those choices have consequences. But choices are also shaped by pain, opportunity, belonging, and what a young person comes to believe is possible for them.
On The Nutters Club this week, Joel Nicholson and Richard Heke spoke about moving from prison to prevention through Reconex NZ, the charitable trust they have set up in Tokoroa to support young people who may not fit easily in traditional education settings. Their work is informed by hard experience: addiction, offending, prison, and the long process of changing direction.
Prison to prevention starts before the crisis
One of the most useful ideas in their story is “pre-habilitation”. It’s a word they coined, and a great concept. Rather than waiting until someone has spent years in the justice system, it asks what support might help before patterns become entrenched.
In mental health, we often see this same problem. Help arrives once things are already severe. A young person has been suspended, arrested, using substances for years, or has burnt through most of the adults who once tried to help. By then, support is still possible, but trust is harder to build and the losses are greater.
Prevention is not about pretending risk is simple. It is about noticing the environments and behaviours that make harm more likely, and building relationships strong enough to offer another option.
Why lived experience can reach young people
Peer support is not magic. Having lived through something does not automatically make someone able to help others. Training, boundaries, accountability and good supervision matter.
But lived experience can do something valuable. It can lower shame. It can make it easier for a young person to believe, “This person gets it.” For young people who have felt judged, written off, or talked at by adults, that can be the beginning of a different kind of conversation.
I have written previously about resilience as something that can be developed, rather than a trait some people simply have or do not have. In practice, resilience often grows through relationships: someone notices, someone listens, someone holds a boundary without giving up.
Belonging, anger, trust and identity
The topics Reconex NZ teaches are telling: goal-setting, cultural identity, empowerment, anger management, rebuilding trust, and recognising high-risk situations. These are not just “life skills” in the narrow sense. They are about helping a young person develop a more coherent sense of who they are and where they might belong.
Anger, for example, is often treated as the problem. Sometimes it is dangerous and needs firm limits. But anger can also be a signal: of humiliation, fear, grief, or feeling powerless. If we only punish the behaviour without understanding what drives it, we may miss the chance to help a young person find safer ways to respond.
Trust is similar. Adults often expect young people to trust them quickly. But for someone who has experienced rejection, abandonment or instability, mistrust may be protective. Rebuilding trust takes time, consistency, and a willingness to keep doing what you said you would do.
This is why relationships matter so much. As I’ve explored before in relation to attachment and resilience, our capacity to cope is deeply shaped by whether we have had reliable people around us. That does not remove personal responsibility. It gives us a clearer picture of what real change often requires.
Listen to the episode
Joel Nicholson and Richard Heke’s conversation is worth hearing in full. It is not a simple redemption story, and it is not a policy paper. It is a discussion about addiction, prison, family, responsibility, and what can happen when people who know the road try to meet young people earlier on it.
