Trapped in a downward spiral of addiction and crime, feeling hopeless and rejected by society, men are being released from prison into society without any of the skills needed to make a new start.
Nehemiah has transformed the lives of over 120 men at Brixton Prison in the past three years with its A New Direction course. Consistently oversubscribed at Brixton, the course was the first of its kind in the UK.
Click here to read more about how A New Direction is breaking the destructive cycle of crime and addiction…
Julian's Story
My mother was a single parent and we lived in a very deprived area of Brixton. By the age of 7, I cooked my own food and washed my own clothes. My mum had my sister when I was eight. Her dad stayed around for a while but then they broke up – so I was responsible for my sister. I had to dress and feed us both and get her to the childminder before going to primary school.
My mum had to work every hour God sent to provide us with food and clothes. She wasn’t able to be there emotionally for us. From a young age I hated that she was a slave to the system and still had no money. I started to develop an unhealthy fascination with money.
The only successful people where I lived were dealers and criminals. From the age of 13 I started mingling with these types. From 14, I began dealing cannabis and by 15 I was dealing crack. Around this time I did my first burglary.
At 16, I moved in with my girlfriend and our baby. I grabbed criminal opportunities when they arose. I started dabbling in ecstasy, coke and drinking. I was sent to prison for six months but made more connections there and sold drugs on a bigger scale when I got out. Over the next five years I was in and out of prison and by 21 my drug use had spiralled out of control.
By 2003 I wanted to make a change but didn’t know how. By 2004 I was arrested again but amazingly, as I was carrying a lot of drugs and money, got bail. I felt that God was giving me a chance. A transaction I’d been involved in had gone wrong just before this and gunshots were fired at my home. The police moved my family to a safe house.
Back in Brixton Prison I enrolled on the A New Direction course. For the first time I began to question the way I thought and behaved. The course taught me to take responsibility for my behaviour and gave me the tools to deal with my emotions so I wouldn’t try to escape from them by using drugs.
Nehemiah’s staff made me feel valued, they genuinely cared about our wellbeing. I wasn’t used to white people giving me that sort of encouragement – not school teachers or nobody.
Having fully recovered, I returned to Nehemiah as a volunteer, then joined the full-time staff team and was made Care Team Leader in February 2008. I have just achieved my NVQ level 3 in Health and Social Care and am also in my third year of a Psychology degree with the Open University. My partner and I have been together for 17 years and are getting married next year. We have two wonderful boys aged seven and 15. My children can now be proud of me.
