Page 334 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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Sociological Theory, Social

Change, and Crime in Rural

Communities

Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Pat Jobes and Elaine Barclay

INTRODUCTION have remained relatively unstudied in the
field of criminology, despite their global recon-
This chapter presents ‘community’ as a key figuration. Finally, crime in the rural context
concept from which to develop a compara- suffers from two mutually reinforcing myths.
tive approach to the examination of crime The first is that rural crime rates are always
among rural people and rural communities. much lower than urban rates when comparing
Community is treated as a sociological data from similar kinds of social units, such as
framework that can relate individual behav- state/provincial or county/county-equivalent
iour, underlying economic and social struc- level areas. Hence, stating the myth, rural
tural characteristics, social meanings and the crime research is neither necessary nor impor-
various demographic and ecological dimen- tant to the scientific advance of criminology.
sions of social phenomena that are relevant to The second is that rural places display less het-
the examination of crime in the rural context erogeneity than urban places. Therefore, since
(Liepins, 2000). A community approach rec- rural communities are mostly alike and the
ognizes the unique characteristics of rural data says urban rates are generally higher, by
social structure and rural cultures, but avoids extrapolation, all rural places display lower
a single template for rural settings, recogniz- crime and exhibit less interesting criminologi-
ing instead that specific rural places are each cal phenomena to study (Donnermeyer and
affected by historical, cultural, social, eco- Jobes, 2000).
nomic and geographical components.
We emphasize rural for three reasons.
Conceptually, rural communities across the
globe share sufficient similarities to be con- THE EVOLUTION OF RURAL CRIME
sidered a common phenomenon despite SCHOLARSHIP
enormous cross-national and cross-cultural
differences. Scientifically, rural community Tönnies (1957) utilized his now famous
characteristics and their relationship to crime Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy to