Christina Plakas, ABF/JPB Early Career Scholar

Christina Plakas

ABF/JPB Access to Justice Research Initiative Early Career Scholar

Christina Plakas (she/her) is a 4th-year Criminology & Criminal Justice Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the administration of justice within legal frameworks, with a particular emphasis on pre-trial justice and the quality of legal resources accessible to individuals in custody. Christina is a Grace Jordan McFadden Professor’s Program Fellow, and the co-founder of Project READ, a community organization that delivers career readiness workshops in local jails. Prior to enrolling in her doctoral program, Christina worked as a civil litigation paralegal specializing in wrongful conviction cases and as a legal coordinator at Rikers Island, where she managed several correctional law libraries and provided legal guidance to detained individuals.

Research Focus

Define and develop criteria for what constitutes meaningful access to the courts for individuals detained in U.S. jails and to use these criteria to create a novel scale that examines the extent to which meaningful access to the courts is offered in a nationally representative sample of jails.