White, middle-class social capital helps to incarcerate African-Americans in racially diverse states.

Social capital is mostly seen as a 'good': bringing communities together and, in the case of criminal justice, encouraging social empathy which can lead to less harsh sentencing. But these analyses ignore racial divisions in social capital. In new research, Daniel Hawes finds that while social capital can reduce the Black-White disparity in incarceration rates in states with few African ...