Profiles in Justice: Christina Bradley, Dir. of Juvenile Social Services
By: Philadelphia Dao
Tags: Juvenile Justice, Criminal Justice Reform, Criminal Justice, Philadelphia, Prosecutor

Born and raised in the heart of North Philadelphia, Christina “Tina” Bradley credits a substitute counselor in her senior year at her vocational high school, Dobbins Technical — where the focus was on employment after graduation, not necessarily college attendance — with encouraging her to pursue higher education. The counselor also helped her secure the financial aid to attend.

This support from caring adults enabled Bradley to major in Criminal Justice at Penn State University Park, and to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. After more than four decades at the Defender Association of Philadelphia advocating for system-involved youth, including as Director of Juvenile Social Services, Bradley was recruited to join the District Attorney’s Office in October 2019, becoming its first-ever Director of Juvenile Social Services.

Tina Bradley spent much of her professional life advocating during the “heavy [school-to-prison] pipeline days, where it was inevitable back then that kids were going to wind up going away from their communities.” During the era of mass incarceration of Philly’s youth, a large portion of her duties entailed advocating for kids to stay in the community and getting youth into less restrictive placements.

“The juvenile justice mandate is supposed to be about rehabilitation and treatment. It’s not supposed to be about punishment,” Bradley says. “I was convinced that if the [DAO] wanted somebody with my background, my experience, and being fully aware of my mindset and how I had been raised as an advocate for those that had been arrested and accused, then I was ready to join the DAO.”

As DAO Director of Juvenile Social Services, Bradley has attended meetings at charter schools with parents and youth to help resolve attendance issues. She also acts as “a resource person, sharing resource information with the different attendance staff.” Bradley has initiated partnerships on behalf of the DAO with Beyond the Bars, The Academy of Industrial Arts (TAIA), an electrician training’s program for older youth. She also helped forge a closer relationship with Work Ready for PYN.

Her lengthy experience working with troubled youth has made her invaluable for helping the criminal legal system ensure that youth who are acting out due to past trauma, for instance, receive appropriate treatment and care for their underlying issues. Bradley also works with criminal legal system partners and organizations on interventions to stop youth criminal behavior, such as selling drugs as part of trafficking networks run by older teens or adults. This social service support to Juvenile Unit attorneys and other stakeholders includes helping them to see their cases through a lens that focuses on both the needs of victims as well as youth.

When she isn’t advocating for Philly youth and victims, she enjoys creating art (her work graces the cover of the DAO’s benefits handbook) and organizing the office’s first-ever bake sale, which recently raised $500 for a local charity.

Tina Bradley wants “to make sure that a thread of compassion, care, concern, and empathy runs through everything that we do, every decision that is made. The community consists of the victim and their family, but it also consists of the alleged offender, the accused and their family, and their network. How we are viewed as treating them helps to really plant the seed for [reform].”

She is guided daily by this mantra picked up from James Baldwin: “For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.”