The social organisation of the rural and crime in the United States: Conceptual considerations

Abstract

A hindrance to the advancement of rural criminological research in the U.S. is the dichotomous thinking about both rural versus urban communities and their relationship to crime which developed during the 20th century, especially under the influence of work associated with the Chicago School of Sociology, and the assumptions underlying social disorganisation theory and the theory of collective efficacy. This article reviews definitions of rural and of conditions in the rural U.S., and then proceeds to an examination of rural criminological research in two areas where a critical body of empirical work has been completed: community characteristics and crime, and rural adolescent substance use. In both strands of rural scholarship, a case can be made for why rural criminological scholarship has great potential to revise substantially mainstream criminological theories about place and crime. A starting point for the conceptual considerations of a new criminology of crime and place is a theoretically strong definition of the concept of community, with consideration of the role of place in a post-modern world.