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This article fleshes out a perspective on culture and lethal violence using examples from two contexts where they are believed to be strongly linked: among rural southern Whites and urban Blacks. Concepts from the cultural paradigm which focuses on understanding how people use cultural resources instead of discerning the content of cultures are employed. Through the lenses of this alternative cultural paradigm, violence in these two settings is partly attributable to an abundance of strategies of action condoning the use of violence. Strategies of action pertinent to defensive or honor-based violence emerge where the law is unavailable and may be amplified by moderate or high levels of poverty. However, when socioeconomic disadvantage is so severe that there is widespread institutional breakdown, strategies of action promoting more predatory and instrumental forms of violence may also evolve. This is because mainstream institutions are a primary source of socialization where cultural tool kits containing strategies of action are expanded and diversified. When they are weak, socialization through street peer groups or illegal markets may be more pronounced, facilitating the contextual transference of violent scripts for action to situations other than those involving honor or character contests. Actors immersed in violent communities are not subsequently mired down in circumstances beyond their control. Through participation in violent activities, they can actively create and reinforce their own violent social environment.

This study advances research on the mental health impacts of disasters by examining how a mainstay of the sociological literature, community attachment, influences negative affective states such as anxiety and fear stimulated by a technological disaster. Survey data were collected in three coastal Louisiana parishes (counties) geographically proximate to the BP oil spill of 2010 while the oil was still flowing. The data reveal that community attachment is associated with higher levels of negative affect. This finding holds for those tied to the fishing and seafood industry, those tied to the oil industry, and those having no immediate links to either industry. These results highlight that although community attachment is essential for community resilience, it can also be disruptive to individual well-being when technological disasters occur in communities dependent on renewable and natural resources.

Extant research testing the Southern culture of violence theory has not fully investigated the logical implications of the theoretical mechanisms asserted to be at work. This analysis builds on prior research by examining the effects of a widely used measure of Southern cultural influence on homicide-type differentiation across cities and over time. Specifically, we examine whether the measure of Southern cultural influence is more likely to generate argument or conflict homicides than other types and whether the Southern influence has been diminishing over time.The results of multilevel latent variable models of homicide-type differentiation for 1980, 1990, and 2000 suggest that the Southern cultural influence does contribute to differentiation toward more argument homicides relative to other types. Relative to felony homicides, the data indicate this pattern has been easing off over time, but relative to drug and gang homicides, it has not.

Crime scholars have long conceptualized culture as a set of values that violence is used to defend or reinforce (i.e., honor). This analysis moves beyond this framework by conceptualizing culture as a toolkit providing strategies of action that individuals use to negotiate social situations. Qualitative data obtained from participant responses to vignettes describing potential conflict situations are analyzed to explore the merit of the cultural toolkit framework as it pertains to the “southern culture of violence” thesis. Contrary to the traditional culture as values model, these data indicate that interpersonal violence is a situationally viable response for diverse groups of people, including males and females, Blacks and Whites, the young and the older. The interplay between culture and social structure is also apparent. Although culture provides individuals with a toolkit, structural factors provide situations in which individuals must decide which cultural tools are most appropriately used. Violence is most viable when individuals feel that the police cannot be relied on and when they perceive that there is an imminent or potentially recurring threat to their family or themselves. Rarely is violent action justified to achieve overarching values, although values are clearly part of the toolkit that informs social action. Participants also frequently report that some segments of their community would consider violence to be an appropriate response even when they personally disagree with that assessment. This highlights the role of agency, where individual lines of action may be constructed independently from perceived community expectations, another major point of departure from the values model.

This analysis investigates the relationships between measures of civic community, population change, and violent crime rates in rural communities. Rural communities that are civically robust are hypothesized to have lower violent crime rates and to experience less change in violent crime over time. Alternatively, sustained population change is hypothesized to elevate violent crime rates and to moderate the protective effect that civic robustness provides against violent crime over time. Results from both lagged panel and cross-sectional negative binomial regression models of county-level data support these expectations. In substantive terms, these findings suggest that civically robust communities are much better positioned to weather population change than civically weak communities, but continuous change over time compromises the protective effect that civic robustness provides against serious crime.

Against the backdrop of the precipitous decline in urban homicide clearance over the past several decades, this study examines factors that may be linked to within-city, over-time variation in homicide clearance rates from 1980 to 2000. Conceptual arguments focusing on case-level characteristics of homicides as well as the broader macrosocial context are delineated and empirically tested. Results from a fixed-effects regression analysis reveal that changes in clearance rates are linked to changes in the situational characteristics of murder incidents such as the percentage of cases involving strangers, firearms, other felonies, and arguments. In addition, within-city changes in immigration are found to be associated with lower clearance rates, whereas drug market arrests are associated with higher clearance rates. Contrary to politically popular assertions, clearance rates do not appear to be a function of changes in police personnel or workload.

This analysis departs from prior macro-level homicide research by focusing on genderspecific homicide rates in rural areas, a completely neglected topic. Drawing on the resource deprivation and gender inequality perspectives, the authors analyze genderd is aggregated homicide offending rates in 1,678 rural counties. Negative binomial regression models provide evidence of the following: Gender-specific measures of unemployment and poverty and a measure of female-headed households exhibit no relationship with female homicide offending, whereas all three measures are associated with elevated levels of male homicide offending. Further, measures of both absolute and relative gender inequality have no association with female or male homicide offending in the rural context. Overall, female homicide offending in rural areas is strongly driven by levels of male offending, which are explained by many of the same factors typically cited in the literature on urban crime.

Many scholars have speculated that the dramatic rise of homicide rates in the late 1980s and their subsequent decline in the 1990s was driven by the expansion and contraction of illegal drug markets and/or law enforcement attempts to regulate these markets. However, the empirical evidence to this end is limited in important ways. This analysis extends prior research and provides evidence of the following: (1) Change in drug market indicators are positively associated with change in both Black and White homicide rates in large U.S. cities between 1984 and 1997. (2) This relationship is substantially stronger for Blacks than for Whites. (3) The socioeconomic moderators of the drug-market/violence link vary by race, with racial inequality being especially important for Blacks and resource deprivation being especially important for Whites. The main implications of the analysis are that the drug-market/ lethal violence connection is much more complex than previously thought, and that simplistic theoretical accounts of the drug market-violence nexus need additional development.

This analysis extends prior macro-level homicide research by examining the links between civic participation, regional subcultures of violence, and age-specific homicide rates. To this end, an integrated community resource perspective was developed and this approach was contrasted with community deficit perspectives. To lend greater specificity, the distinctive effects of religious and secular participation on community levels of juvenile and adult homicide were also considered. Analyses of county-level adult and juvenile homicide offending patterns suggest that regional subcultures as well as religious and secular forms of civic participation play important—yet age-graded—roles in reducing interpersonal violence.

In two experiments, primed subjects were exposed to violent and misogynistic rap music and control subjects were exposed to popular music. Experiment 1 showed that violent and misogynistic rap music increased the automatic associations underlying evaluative racial stereotypes in high and low prejudiced subjects alike. By contrast, explicit stereotyping was dependent on priming and subjects’ prejudice level. In Experiment 2, the priming manipulation was followed by a seemingly unrelated person perception task in which subjects rated Black or White targets described as behaving ambiguously. As expected, primed subjects judged a Black target less favorably than a White target. By contrast, control subjects rated Black and White targets similarly. Subjects’ level of prejudice did not moderate these findings, suggesting the robustness of priming effects on social judgments.