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A growing body of research lends support to opportunity theory and its variants, but has yet to focus systematically on a number of specific offenses and contexts. Typically, the more crimes and contexts to which a theory applies, the broader its scope and range, respectively, and thus generalizability. In this paper, we focus on agricultural crime victimization--including theft of farm equipment, crops, livestock, and chemicals--an offense that opportunity theory appears well-situated to explain. Specifically, we examine whether key dimensions of the theory are empirically associated with the likelihood of victimization and also examine factors associated with farmers' use of guardianship measures. In contrast to much previous research, we combine multiple individual-level measures of these dimensions. We conclude that the theory partially accounts for variation in agricultural crime victimization, depending on the type of crime, and that greater work is needed investigating how key dimensions of opportunity theory should be conceptualized and operationalized in rural contexts. The study's implications for theory and practice are discussed. (Contains 4 tables, 1 figure, and 11 footnotes.)

The link between resource deprivation and urban violence has long been explored in criminological research. Studies, however, have largely ignored the potential for resource deprivation in particular communities to affect rates of violence in others. The relative inattention is notable because of the strong theoretical grounds to anticipate influences that extend both to geographically contiguous areas and to those that, though not contiguous, share similar social characteristics. We argue that such influences—what we term spatial and social proximity effects, respectively—constitute a central feature of community dynamics. To support this argument, we develop and test theoretically derived hypotheses about spatial and social proximity effects of resource deprivation on aggregated and disaggregated homicide counts. Our analyses indicate that local area resource deprivation contributes to violence in socially proximate communities, an effect that, in the case of instrumental homicides, is stronger when such communities are spatially proximate. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories focused on community-level social processes and violence, and for policies aimed at reducing crime in disadvantaged areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a semiparametric information-theoretic framework for modeling the determinants of rare events aggregated at intracity areal units while allowing for various forms of error correlation structures. The approach is applied to an examination of the effects of socioeconomic and demographic macrocharacteristics of communities on the amount of violence they experience. We investigate and find evidence of some instability in these processes across types of violence and level of areal aggregation. However, we also find evidence of a stable predictor—resource deprivation—for all the types of violence analyzed and at both levels of areal aggregation considered. In addition, we find evidence of a spillover effect of a community's resource deprivation on the level of violence its neighboring areas can expect. We discuss our findings in light of their substantive, methodological, and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]