‘I DID STUPID THINGS FOR NO REASON.’;

KENT SALLAS

Palm Beach Post January 23, 2000

Copyright 2000 Palm Beach Newspaper, Inc.

Candy Hatcher

When Kent was 3, he learned to talk. At 10, he had sex for the first time. He learned to read when he was 11. And when he was 15, he went to prison. Kent Sallas reveals this information with such nonchalance that you wonder whether he understands the slightest thing about normalcy. And then you realize he understands too well; he just can’t relate.

Home used to be whatever mental hospital or foster home, or whichever family member, would take him. He was too much for his mother and his teachers. The Department of Juvenile Justice didn’t help. He committed 21 crimes in seven weeks, 10 or 12 of them burglaries to which he readily confessed. So in October 1998, this gangly 15- year-old from Jupiter, a perpetual runaway who had been in trouble since he was 7, became the Department of Corrections’ responsibility until 2002.

For the first time in his life, Kent has stability. He can’t run away. At Indian River Correctional Institution near Vero Beach, he has a job as a houseman that “keeps (him) out of trouble.”

He rises at 5:30 a.m. He learns carpentry. He cleans the dorms. He keeps to himself. “I don’t like getting too close to people.”

“I’m a lost kid in life because I didn’t get to experience what I should’ve in childhood. I have had to grow up on my own.”

– Kent’s earliest memory is of a Christmas party in Texas when he was 3. His father, whom he hadn’t seen since he was a baby, showed up and brought Kent’s older brother a present. Kent remembers asking him for a gift. He also recalls his father’s reply: “I forgot about you, son.”

The boy’s problems were overwhelming. As a baby, he couldn’t hear, and he learned to talk only after doctors inserted tubes in his ears to drain fluid that resulted from infections. At 5, Kent was diagnosed with a congenital brain defect. He couldn’t make decisions. He had trouble forming attachments. Doctors recommended a special foster home for children with similar problems.

By age 6, Kent was running away. As he explains it, “I didn’t take orders that good.” His mother sent him to a state mental hospital in Austin, where he was diagnosed as emotionally and socially disabled, hyperactive “and all the other things.” Doctors put him on Ritalin, but he refused to take it. From there, he was sent to a boys’ home for a few months. He told people he was abused so they would send him somewhere else.

When he was 8, Kent went to live with his father and stepmother. Kent remembers the drinking. “I used to get beat a lot . . . We didn’t stay anywhere longer than six months.” He ran away. A neighbor took him in, called police and suggested that Kent live with his grandparents. That didn’t work, either, so 10-year-old Kent and his mother moved from Texas to Jupiter, where they lived with one of his older brothers for a year.

His brother treated Kent well, paid him for helping him lay tile, taught him to drive. But Kent, who had attended school only sporadically through the years, still hadn’t learned to read. He began smoking marijuana, drinking, going to parties. By the time he was 12, Kent was stealing to get the things his family couldn’t afford.

“I didn’t have nothing,” he said. “My friends had everything. I robbed to look good and to have my room look good.” He took televisions, VCRs, Sony PlayStations, jewelry. What an adrenaline rush! He began selling drugs to friends.

Didn’t his family notice? “My mom didn’t come in my room. I wouldn’t let her.” His mother tried to help him, he said, tried to discipline him “like a mom would.” But she’s had a tough life, too, filled with bad relationships and besides, he said, “I do what I want.”

– Police first arrested Kent on a charge of retail theft. Records show he was ordered to go through a program for first-time juvenile criminals. Kent doesn’t remember that. He remembers several visits to the detention center and a nice officer named Mr. Sanders, who later wrote to Kent in prison. He remembers a teacher at the 45th Street Mental Health Center in West Palm Beach helping him learn to read, finally. He remembers being charged with arson, and the locked residential center where he lived with 19 other delinquent boys. Of the teens he lived with for those months, at least seven have gone on to adult prison.

Juvenile programs “don’t help you,” Kent said. “They don’t do anything to change you. Just lock you up and do your time.”

They certainly didn’t help Kent. Three times, Jupiter police brought the 13-year-old to the station, interviewed him about burglaries and fed him pizza. They told him he was smart. They recommended juvenile programs, even the most secure program in the system. Prosecutors said no. Kent needed punishment, not another break.

When he went to court, he was facing 23 years in prison for burglaries, stealing a shotgun and running from the police station. His mother, trained as a nurse, brought records to document his medical and mental problems. Kent put on his best baby face for the judge, blamed his problems on being brain-damaged and asked for help. The judge, Kent said later, was too smart for that. He sentenced Kent to four years in the adult prison system but requested a prison for youths younger than 24.

– Kent, 16, has 2 1/2 years to go. He is surviving. He used to get a disciplinary report every month for disobeying orders or mouthing off to an officer. Now, he knows when to keep silent.

He is attending vocational classes to learn carpentry. There’s no hands-on training, he said, so he’s having to learn from books. Once he has mastered carpentry, he plans to go back to class to earn his high school diploma.

At 6-foot-3, he looks older than 16. He talks tough. He is tough, he said. Too tough to need psychiatric help. Tattooed on his right forearm is the numeral 6, a symbol of the prison gang Folk Nation. Gangs are for “whoever needs a family,” he said. “It’s not a violent thing. It’s something you do to look out for each other in prison.”

His mother visits once a month. One brother has come to see him twice. His friends haven’t even written. “When I get out, I’m gonna be by myself,” he said. “I plan on doing construction or carpentry. Just build stuff and build stuff and build stuff until I get old.”

Kent jokes about having to fill out a job application once he’s out of prison. When he gets to the part that asks about felony convictions, he said, he’ll need an extra sheet of paper to list them all.

He says he is sorry for stealing. “I did stupid things for no reason. Now, I look at it, and if the s— got stolen from me, I’d want to kill.” He wrote seven letters of apology to his victims. Two, he said, wrote back and said they understood.

Kent said he thinks more about consequences. He is growing up. Perhaps that would have happened without confinement, the way it happens with most boys caught breaking the law once. They steal from a store, or break into a car, and police arrest them. Sometimes, they go to court. Most times, they don’t. Being locked up as a child didn’t do anything to Kent but make him angry. “I been locked up since I was 12,” he said. Only recently has he realized “you only change yourself.

“They might give you hints, but you got to change yourself.”