Dr. Bethany Murray

Bethany Murray, PhD, is a Turpanjian Postdoctoral Fellow for the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Her scholarship examines the historical and contemporary interlockings of social work, policing, and the criminal legal system. Her research sits at the intersection of social welfare history, sociolegal studies, and critical carceral studies, with a particular focus on carceral governance and the intertwined governing logics of care and carcerality. Rather than positioning care and punishment as oppositional forces, her work examines how institutions of care are frequently mobilized alongside systems of surveillance, regulation, and social control. She situates the profession of social work as a key site where these tensions are negotiated, contested, and institutionalized.

Her dissertation, Counterinsurgent Care: Social Work, Policing, and the Management of Black Liberation, traces how social work became integrated into police reform efforts in Los Angeles following the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and policy analysis, the project argues that social work was mobilized as a bureaucratic apparatus that absorbed demands for racial justice into reform strategies that ultimately strengthened the legitimacy and reach of the carceral state. By examining the emergence of collaborative models between social workers, police, and other state actors, the dissertation illuminates the historical foundations of contemporary debates surrounding co-response, violence intervention, and alternatives to policing.

Beyond historical inquiry, Dr. Murray’s research investigates the implementation of youth justice and public safety reforms, the governance of behavioral health systems, and the ways professionalization of care shapes responses to marginalized communities. Across these projects, she asks how professions committed to care become entangled with institutions of punishment, and what possibilities exist for reimagining care beyond carceral governance. She is committed to producing scholarship that bridges historical analysis, implementation research, and community-engaged inquiry to inform more just and equitable approaches to public safety and social welfare.

She earned her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MSW from the University of Minnesota, and serves as a board member of Abolition Perspectives in Social Work as well as the California Social Welfare Archive.