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Criminals, depending on the areas in which they live, develop a diversity of personalities and traits, and understanding them helps to comprehend the mechanism of committing illegal acts and therefore aids the development of effective mechanisms to prevent and fight crime. The specificity of the rural zones in the Republic of Moldova is also determined by certain conditions and factors that contribute to the formation of criminals with certain specific traits and characteristics. Studying the distinctive features of rural lawbreakers would help police officials to foresee some risk situations and develop a number of general, special or even individual preventive measures. As a result, rural crime could be controlled or even reduced to an extent to provide citizens with a sense of security and a sense of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural policy has produced the unintended consequences of illegal deer taking and the persecution of badgers in the rural West Country of England. This article directs attention towards the mechanisms of social relations between unregulated industry operatives, rural networks and entrepreneurial premises. Accordingly, the offending process is shown to be one of 'illicit enterprise', accomplished for instrumental gain through interdependencies between licit and illicit endeavours—practices that emerge synergistically, upon interaction with wider geo-historical conditions. Crucially, illicit activity is shown to be heavily context dependent, contingencies that generate unanticipated outcomes that are peculiar to the tendencies of the South West. Distal conditions are inserted into the explication to posit the antecedent contexts that inadvertently enable the illegal killing of animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the implication of drug-induced homicide for the criminal cases in populated rural areas. It discusses how the lack of government funding in rural areas affect the stability of their criminal legal systems. It examines the challenges commonly faced by rural areas when dealing with opioid abuse-related cases such as lack of attorneys, absence of intermediary courts as well as lower courts trials oversight.

This article examines the relationship between leadership and public value, which is particularly challenging in a context of explicit contest and conflict. The theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of policing rural crime. The study reveals that the police worked with multiple and competing publics rather than a single homogeneous public, and that part of their leadership role was to create and convene a public space in which different voices and divergent views could be expressed. The study notes that research needs to pay attention to the loss and displacement of public value, not solely its creation and recognition. The need to convene multiple publics required the police to lead, as part of a leadership constellation, and with political astuteness. The findings have wider relevance for other public services, and for studies of leadership and public value at the intersection between the state and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a theoretical perspective based on the ideas of Foucault, critical criminology, and rural criminology, to examine how social relations influenced tax evasion mechanisms in agriculture in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. The paper's main contribution is to show how tax evasion mechanisms are deeply rooted in social relationships developed in the grain market. Through the analysis of thirty interviews, official statistics of tax evasion convictions, and administrative resolutions issued by the national tax agency, I argue that severe formal controls were unsuccessful in eradicating tax evasion because normative changes could not abruptly annul the social relations that made tax evasion in agriculture possible. On the contrary, tax evasion persisted, although some evasion mechanisms were left aside and new ones were created. Thus, it is necessary to stress the importance of a paper that studies economic crimes in geographic areas outside the global north, such as rural Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines imprisonment data from Victoria between 1860 and 1920 to gather insights into the variations in incidence of women being convicted by rural versus urban courts, including close focus on the difference in types of offences being committed in urban and rural locations. This paper also details women's mobility between both communities as well as change in their offending profiles based on their geographic locations. Our findings suggest that while the authorities were broadly most concerned with removing disorderly and vagrant women from both urban and rural streets, rural offending had its own characteristics that differentiate it from urban offending. Therefore, this demonstrates that when examining female offending, geographic location of an offender and offence must be taken into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the unemployment-crime (U-C) relationship in urban and rural Pennsylvania counties using a balanced panel data set over the period from 1990 to 2009. A two-way fixed effects model is estimated to account for unobserved county-specific and time-specific heterogeneity. The criminal opportunity and criminal motivation effects of unemployment on crime advanced by Cantor and Land are tested. The results suggest that there are rural-urban differences in the impacts of the covariates. Specifically, both statistically significant criminal opportunity and criminal motivation effects are present in urban counties. In contrast, rural counties fail to conform to U-C predictions. Oaxaca decomposition reveals that the unexplained portion of the rural-urban difference in the crime rate is 12%. The results provide support for addressing labor market conditions to complement traditional crime-fighting measures in urban settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data on the incidence and prevalence of hate crimes in the United States come primarily from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). Although UCR data undercount most crimes, hate crimes are particularly underreported, especially for some groups. We compare 2000-2011 UCR data in Pennsylvania to data from a state agency that came from police, media, and citizen reports. First, we find that the state-agency database is generally consistent with the UCR data, in terms of absolute counts, correlations, and predictors. Second, we find that UCR data underestimate hate crime rates by a factor of about 1.6 overall and by a factor of 2.5 for rural areas. Moreover, although UCR data on hate crimes show a decrease in the most recent 5-year period, the state agency data show that hate crime incident counts have not dropped. We suggest that using a broader index that includes both the UCR and a database like that in Pennsylvania will give a more complete picture of hate crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural crime is a heavily misunderstood and marginalized area of criminology. In the United Kingdom in particular, there is limited scholarship on the issue and even less on particular types of rural crime, such as rural vandalism. With this in mind, this article reviews the applicability of five deviance theories to several forms of rural vandalism, through a less traditional lens that challenges criminological and rural norms. The article concludes by arguing that most of the theories examined are relevant to explanations of rural vandalism. However, it also emphasizes the need for a solid definition of rural crime, and an overall move away from the urban focus of criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to discuss the trends and nature of rural violence in Brazil. Assuming the hypothesis of an increase in violence rates, urban–rural violence rates are compared at three geographical levels: national (Brazil), state (São Paulo), and municipal (Rio Claro). The study combines the analyses of official statistics with newspaper reports, videos, and articles published by the national media. Findings indicate an increase in violence in rural areas in recent decades but such a rise is far from homogenous across the country; it shows links to patterns of population change, economic expansion, and organized crime. Although violence has long being an inherent characteristic of rural Brazil—a place of conflicts and struggles—it is argued here that the more recent rise in violence is distinct from the past, at least in its portrayal by the media. The article finalizes by suggesting a research agenda to improve the understanding of the dynamics of violence in the Brazilian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illegal diversification strategies in farming contexts are neglected in research terms. There are endogenous and exogenous factors that influence the potential strategic capability and activity of illegal entrepreneurs and criminal farmers. Internal factors include the personal characteristics of the farmer–qualities and skills. External factors, outside the control of the individual illegal entrepreneur, include the activities and processes undertaken by them, the characteristics of the illegal enterprise, government policies, markets and environmental factors. Using a documentary research methodology of 210 case studies, located on the internet, from across the UK (where farmers had been charged with criminal offences relating to their occupation), the article contributes to the literature on farm diversification and rural crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effects of urban sprawl and population density on crime in suburban and rural municipalities. It is posited that population density provides additional context to macro-level crime research, potentially impacting the vitality of neighborhoods' social institutions. Three models were created using data from the 2000 and 2010 US Census and Uniform Crime Reports for 142 municipalities, measuring the effect of municipal characteristics and population density on violent and property crimes. The results reveal that the traditional neighborhood characteristics measured in social disorganization research provide significant explanatory power for both measures of crime at the municipal level. Population density was found to have a significant negative relationship with property crime. A discussion and future research suggestions are presented to conclude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial proportion of the world's population remains rural, despite decades of urbanization. Further, most of this rural population lies south of the equator. Therefore, it is incumbent on the emerging fields of rural criminology and global southern criminology to mutually reinforce each other's scholarly development. To this end, this article engages three selected issues associated with agriculture and food - agricultural victimization, food security, and farm worker abuse and trafficking - and discusses them in terms of the advancement of a global southern criminology. The article concludes with acknowledgement of many more rural crime issues that have particular salience to the global South and warns of new dangers in the development of hegemonies binaries (Harrington, Hog and Ozone 2016) and homogenous categories of knowledge (Connell 2007) if they fail to inform each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been little research on citizens' attitudes about policing in rural communities in the USA, and existing studies do not examine the effects of community characteristics on these attitudes. We extend this work theoretically and analytically by considering the effects of community context, police organisation and individual characteristics on attitudes about police. Using data for a large sample of citizens residing in 98 small towns in Iowa, we employed multilevel ordered logistic regression techniques to model citizens' rating of police protection and degree of trust in the police. At the community level, social disorganisation was negatively associated with both outcome variables, and social integration was positively related to trust in the police. Town police departments were viewed more favourably than county sheriff's offices for both police protection and trust. Individual-level perceptions of social integration and community safety were positively related to both outcome variables. Respondents' sociodemographic characteristics had relatively few significant effects. A statistical interaction between social disorganisation and individual perceptions of social integration was observed for trust in the police, with higher levels of perceived social integration attenuating the negative effect of social disorganisation. In sum, contextual, organisational and individual predictors all had important effects on attitudes about police in this study. These findings demonstrate that theories emphasising community context are essential to a more complete understanding of crime-related attitudes in rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on data from the 2010, 2012, and 2014 Communities that Care Youth Survey, the authors examine the protective factors associated with rural and urban students in grades 6 through 12 across several domains. This research is based on the literature that associates rural areas with a more protective environment and resulting lower rates of deviance. Findings were mixed, but overall rural youth had higher protective factor scores. A summary of all 84 protective factor scores follows: 26 factors shown no significant different between rural and urban students; on 42 protective factors rural youth had higher scores, as opposed to urban youth with higher protective scores on only 16 factors. Implications of findings for crime and delinquency are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, Depictions of Youth Homicide: Films Set in Rural Environments, reviews portrayals of youth homicide within six films that are set in rural environs. It examines depictions concerning the environment or setting of the film, including how media may explore notions of formal and informal social control as a means by which to explain some aspects of rural crime. The findings suggest that though films that depict youth homicide in rural settings encompass stereotypes often associated with rural crime, such as perceived police incompetence and the importance of informal social control in regard to community ties. However, there are still some instances in which rural homicide was framed in a realistic light, for example, the fact that rural firearm use for their actual purpose is common and firearm accidents are common, but firearms as a means of homicide are rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William J. Chambliss (Bill) is well-known for his path-breaking theories of lawmaking and for his innovative research on state-organized crime. However, the fact that his study of the original vagrancy laws marked the birth of rural critical criminology has gone unrecognized by criminologists. The main objective of this article is twofold: (1) to show how Bill helped shape contemporary rural critical criminology and (2) to provide suggestions for further critical theoretical and empirical work on rural crime and social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early to mid-1990s, Patricia Gagne's work on woman abuse in the Appalachian region of the United States (U.S) sparked contemporary feminist interpretations of rural crime and social control. Nevertheless, the flames did not emerge until the latter part of the last decade, with the publication of a spate of scholarly books, journal articles, and chapters. These feminist contributions enhance an empirical and theoretical understanding of rural criminality and societal reactions to it, but there are still key gaps in gender and rural crime research. The main objective of this article is twofold: (1) to briefly review the extant feminist literature on rural crimes and societal reactions to them and (2) to suggest new directions in the development of a feminist rural criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study was to determine the rate at which police are notified of violent victimizations in rural areas, the rate at which victims of violence in rural areas receive emergency room (ER) treatment for their injuries, if these two rates are related to each other, and if these two rates are similar to corresponding rates across rural, suburban, and urban locations. Substantively, these analyses allow us to test arguments suggesting police notification of criminal victimization is lower in rural relative to non-rural areas. Methodologically, these analyses provide insight into patterns of seeking medical treatment for violent victimization. We obtained data from the 1996–2005 United States National Crime Victimization Survey on victims of serious violence who had been injured and sought medical treatment. Variables of interest included police notification, ER treatment, and location type (i.e., rural, suburban, and urban). We used log-linear modeling with iterative proportional fitting to perform Goodness-of-Fit tests for independence of and interactions between the variables. In addition to discovering the rate at which police are notified of these serious violent victimizations in rural areas (74%) and the rate at which the rural victims of violence seek medical treatment in the ER (30%), we found (1) rates of both police notification and ER treatment are independent of location (i.e., they are similar in rural, suburban, and urban areas), (2) police notification and ER treatment are not independent of each other (i.e., they are correlated regardless of location type), and (3) three-way interactions between location type, police notification, and ER treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the plethora of research on crime and rurality, relatively little has been written about location in terms of the offender or the victim. This is all the more surprising, given that wider criminological theories, such as routine activity theory, address how and why perpetrators and their victims are drawn to the crime locale, and perceptions of an endangered countryside often assign responsibility to outsider offenders. This contribution draws on the writer's work, between 2002 and 2005, in carrying out the Cornwall Crime Surveys (CCSs) in one rural county of England, to develop an exploratory model of crime and place in the countryside. In terms of both offender and victim, it is argued that location can be viewed in two ways: firstly, the status of offenders and victims in the area; secondly, their reasons for being at the crime scene. Thus victims' status in the area can be described according to whether they are: long term residents; recent arrivals; second home owners; temporary residents, e.g. seasonal workers; or visitors, e.g. holidaymakers or there on business. While their reasons for being at the crime scene may be because it is their home, workplace or a leisure facility. Similarly, offenders' status in the area can be described according to whether they are: long term residents; recent arrivals; temporary residents, e.g. seasonal workers; visitors, e.g. holidaymakers; travelling criminals; or commuter criminals. And their reasons for being at the crime scene may be because it is their home, workplace, or leisure facility, or a location specifically targeted. This model adds to our understanding of where and why offences are committed in rural areas, fear of crime, and what crime reduction measures might be most effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]