Revisiting Hawes: Social Capital and Racial Disparity in Incarceration Rates

Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, the U.S prison system has experienced continuous substantial increment in the prison population. At the same time, incarceration rates have risen by more than 300%, a phenomenon that many analysts have referred to as mass incarceration (DeFina and Hannon, 2013). This study investigates the various divergent impacts of social capital on policy egalitarianism in state outcomes. Notably, this paper reviews the relationships connecting social capital and incarceration rates, while analyzing the level of racial disparities in incarceration rates in the American states using a state-level panel data spanning 1980 to 2015. Building on work by Hawes (2017), we present a theoretical description and empirical examination for how social capital functions uniquely under different racial contexts using a newer dataset. The results suggest that there is a positive correlation between social capital and the incarceration of many African American which is more profound in some states than others.