“Social capital” can refer either to an individual’s relational and reputational assets or to the collective efficacy of a neighborhood, group, or organization: roughly speaking, its capacity to get its members to contribute resources or effort for collective purposes (that is, to make public contributions to the public goods of that collectivity).

Financial assets and transactions are far easier to measure than social assets and the processes that produce and destroy them. But that doesn’t mean financial matters are more important. Policy analysts in particular need to pay more attention to social assets and processes, and to the distribution of social as well as financial resources.

Application to crime control policy:

At the individual level, having a habit or law-breaking and/or an official criminal record, or a group of friends and acquiantances with such characteristics, constitutes a negative relational/reputational asset.

At the collective level, a high crime rate by, against, or (especially) within a group saps collective efficacy and therefore constitutes negative group social capital.

Moreover, good or bad behavior by anyone with a given social identity tends to rub off on the reputations of others who share that identity: that’s the phenomenon called “reputational externality.” Crime is an important source of negative reputational externalities.