From incarceration to graduation

When Chris Young ’26 graduates from SMU on May 16, he’ll be celebrating a milestone he didn’t consider as a boy growing up in extreme poverty in Clarksville, Tennessee. By age 22, he had been sentenced to two federal life sentences without parole – a reality that would have squelched the dreams of most. 

Not Chris.

“I always knew I was going to get out,” the soon to be economics and public policy graduate tells SMU students when professors ask him to speak to their classes.

Brittany K. Barnett, the Dallas attorney and SMU law graduate who worked four years for Chris’ release, and former federal judge Kevin Sharp, who stepped down from the bench in protest after sentencing Chris, will be among those attending and celebrating his graduation.

At age 22, when many young adults are graduating from college, Chris was arrested as part of a drug trafficking investigation. He had been arrested earlier for two minor drug offenses as a teenager. After his arrest, he spent four years in the county jail awaiting his trial under the “three strikes you’re out” mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws in place at the time.

While in custody, Chris began spending time in the prison library reading books about economics, physics, history and politics. He taught himself to program without a computer. He created his own curriculum to meet the intellectual curiosity that circumstances of his life left unfulfilled. He says he imagined he was in college reading for his classes and that his cell was his book-filled dorm room.

He also learned about allocution, the right of a defendant to make a personal statement to the court before sentencing. Chris spent months drafting and memorizing his 45-minute statement.

“I wanted to be seen,” he says. “I wanted the judge to know I was a person.”

Chris was seen – after listening to Chris’ allocution statement, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Sharp gave Chris in 2014 the mandatory minimum sentence the law dictated: two life sentences in federal prison. Two years later however, Judge Sharp stepped down from his lifetime federal appointment, citing Chris’ case and the injustice of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines as part of the reason for his departure.

Chris’ reading and subsequent studies show up in conversation with him today. He may illustrate a point with a quote from Plato or Seneca or cite a Japanese proverb. After meeting Chris, journalism faculty member Valerie Evans began inviting him to speak to her students each semester. Neatly dressed in jeans, a collared long-sleeved shirt and sneakers, Chris tells students his story, encouraging them to rethink stereotypes, a key lesson for new journalists, Evans says.

Barnett, who took on her first nonviolent drug offender case in 2009 as an SMU law student, had already agreed to take Chris’ case when in 2018 she created the Buried Alive Project with Dedman School of Law’s Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center as her research partner. Still incarcerated, Chris became one of the founders of the project, dedicated to change through litigation and legislation.

SMU students became key resources as 75 law students devoted 750 research hours studying the cases of individuals like Chris while SMU graduate statistics students analyzed 30 years of legal data. Creative writing students told the stories of incarcerated individuals for the Buried Alive website, bringing the project’s work to life. 

For many of the 60,000 individuals in federal prisons for nonviolent drug charges, clemency granted by the U.S. president is their only hope for release. For Chris, his dream was realized in 2021 after 13 years of incarceration when President Trump granted him clemency. Along with Barnett’s years of work, his case had drawn national attention, including advocacy from Kim Kardashian.

After graduation, Chris will work with publisher Little, Brown and Company to prepare for the August publication of his memoir, “The Wound is Where the Light Enters: A Memoir of Resilience.”

“I don’t take my freedom for granted,” he says.