Spring 2026 Winner of the Power of Change Scholarship

Kirsti Jessie Randazzo

Jessie is earning a J.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She decided to pursue law school after many years of watching the legal system fail those with limited resources and legal knowledge. We are honored to award a student who demonstrates perseverance and a passion for justice.

Read Their Essay Here:

My motivation to study criminal justice comes from watching how often the legal system fails to deliver the fairness it claims to embody. I decided to return to school at thirty four because I had reached a point where observing these failures from the outside was no longer acceptable to me. I wanted the training and authority to intervene. Criminal justice is not an abstract academic interest for me. It is the field where law becomes real for people, sometimes in life changing ways. It determines who is believed, who is protected, who is punished, and who is forgotten. When the system breaks down, it breaks down on the backs of people who already carry the weight of inequality.

During my externship at the Champaign County State’s Attorney’s Office, I saw this reality up close. In traffic and felony court, I watched how a single hearing could shape the future of a defendant who had no legal background, limited resources, and often very little trust in the system judging them. Even routine matters revealed deep structural issues. A person’s ability to argue their case, communicate with the court, or understand the consequences of a plea often depended on factors that had nothing to do with guilt or innocence. I also saw how discretion by prosecutors and judges could be used to reduce harm or unintentionally reinforce it. Those experiences confirmed that criminal justice cannot be improved from a distance. It has to be confronted from within the institutions where decisions are made every day.

I am motivated by the gap between what the system says it is and what it actually does. Criminal justice is supposed to reflect fairness, accuracy, and a respect for human dignity. In practice, outcomes often depend on access to counsel, available resources, and the biases that shape everything from arrest decisions to sentencing. The people most affected by these shortcomings are the ones with the fewest tools to navigate them. Women facing intimate partner violence, young defendants who have spent their lives overpoliced, and families caught between financial instability and legal consequences all carry the cost of a system that moves faster than their ability to understand it. Studying criminal justice gives me the framework to identify the patterns that produce these harms and the leverage to challenge them.

The change I hope to make in my community centers on increasing access to justice and strengthening the fairness of criminal legal processes. I want to continue working in environments where I can evaluate how decisions are made, how power is exercised, and how outcomes can be redirected toward accountability rather than damage. My goal is to contribute to a system where people are not left behind because they lacked legal knowledge, support, or resources. In the years ahead, I hope to work in roles that allow me to review charging decisions, evaluate the use of plea bargaining, and advocate for practices that reduce unnecessary harm. I want to help build a criminal justice system that treats people as individuals rather than case numbers and that recognizes the importance of context, humanity, and proportionate response.

Criminal justice motivates me because it is the part of the legal world where the stakes are highest and the failures are the most visible. It is also the area with the greatest potential for meaningful change when people inside the system are willing to examine its weaknesses honestly. My studies and my work at the State’s Attorney’s Office have shown me how much work remains to be done and have strengthened my commitment to ensuring that fairness is not an aspiration but a reality.