Rural Crime, Poverty, and Community

In this chapter, we begin the development of a cross-community sociological perspective for the examination of crime amongst rural populations. We utilize "community" as the central concept linking broad change and the behaviors of individuals, both as possible perpetrators and victims of crime.Throughout most of the 20th century rural crime ranked among the least studied phenomena in criminology, especially in the US. If rural was considered at all, it was as a convenient "ideal type" contrasted with the criminogenic conditions assumed to exist exclusively in urban locations. Rural crime was rarely examined, either comparatively with urban crime or as a subject worthy of investigation in its own right. Occasional work by Clinard on rural criminal offenders (1942; 1944), Gibbons (1972) and Dinitz (1973) on victimization in rural communities, and Lentz (1956), Feldhusen, Thurston and Ager (1965) and Polk (1969) on rural juvenile delinquency, were early exceptions to the dominant urban focus of the time.