The Dark Side of Gemeinschaft: Criminality within rural communities

Two studies of agricultural crime in Australia found that rural communities have informal social norms for tolerating certain types of crime and for proscribing the reporting of such crimes. Many victims of crime suffered in silence. Some were pressured to conform, keep the peace, and not accuse someone in the community of theft under threat of exclusion from the community. Some victims were judged to be deserving of their victimisation. The extent to which these attitudes and behaviours prevail in rural communities was investigated through mail surveys and interviews with farmers. While the studies focused upon agricultural crimes, it is suggested that these same cultural practices and social judgements are likely to be extended to several other crimes, including alcohol-related violations and sexual assault, and to other situations where the Gemeinschaft-type qualities within rural communities encourage crime

A Tale of Two Towns: Social Structure, Integration and Crime in Rural New South Wales

This paper examines social factors that are associated with crime in two rural Australian communities with high proportions of Aboriginal people. It draws upon the theoretical contributions of Braithwaite (1989) to explain how levels of community integration and cohesion affect the presence of crime. Data for the case studies are derived from secondary statistics, surveys, observation and in-depth interviews. Existing literature on crime in Australia emphasises the disproportionate representation of Aboriginal people within the criminal justice system. Yet, by comparing and contrasting the two communities, the analysis demonstrated that social structural and perceptual characteristics, rather than Indigenous status, account for high levels of crime in one community and low levels in the other. The analyses demonstrate that communities with high levels of social cohesion can ameliorate the affects of social disorganisation, division, and disadvantage in communities with high Aboriginal populations. It further demonstrates that rural crime is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon

Renewing Criminalized and Hegemonic Cultural Landscapes

The Mafia's long historical pedigree in Mezzogiorno, Southern Italy, has empowered the Mafioso as a notorious, uncontested, and hegemonic figure. The counter-cultural resistance against the mafiosi culture began to be institutionalized in the early 1990s. Today, Libera Terra is the largest civil society organization in the country that uses the lands confiscated from the Mafia as a space of cultural repertoire to realize its ideals. Deploying labor force through volunteer participation, producing biological fruits and vegetables, and providing information to the students on the fields are the principal cultural practices of this struggle. The confiscated lands make the Italian experience of anti-Mafia resistance a unique example by connecting the land with the ideals of cultural change. The sociocultural resistance of Libera Terra conveys a political message through these practices and utters that the Mafia is not invincible. This study draws the complex panorama of the Mafia and anti-Mafia movement that uses the ‘confiscated lands’ as cultural and public spaces for resistance and socio-cultural change. In doing so, this article sheds new light on the relationship between rural criminology and crime prevention policies in Southern Italy by demonstrating how community development practice of Libera Terra changes the meaning of landscape through iconographic symbolism and ethnographic performance

Preventing the diversion of Turkish opium

Turkey was once one of the world’s largest sources of illicit opium; the majority diverted from sparsely regulated licit production. Since 1972, however, it has contributed almost no opium to the global black market. As such, Turkey is one of a small number of states to have eradicated, or severally reduced, the national supply of illicit opium. This article reconsiders post-1974 Turkish controls from a situational crime prevention perspective. It is suggested that Turkish success was founded upon reducing opportunities for diversion from regulated production by hardening targets, increasing formal and informal surveillance, assisting compliance through fair procurement practices and increasing the risk of non-compliance

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

Preaching to the Choir: A Comparison of the Use of Integrated Data Sets in Criminology Journals in Australia, England and the United States

Empirical analyses of crime increasingly rely on integrated data. This paper considers advantages and limitations of integrated data sets, comparative uses of such data in "The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology", "British Journal of Criminology" and "Criminology", as well as speculations based on these findings. Integrated data analysis has amplified methodological issues. The reliability of secondary data analysis is both supported and challenged. Relevant questions include how crime is associated with actuarial measures and which measures are most reliable. The more difficult question is whether actuarial measures are valid indicators. One extreme empirical orientation, positivism, relies on empirical, often quantitative, data, and scientific method to derive conclusions and guide policy (Young, 1992a). The other extreme relies on discourse and persuasion. Implications of relying on or rejecting actuarialism are discussed in the context of integrated data research published in the above-mentioned criminology journals

A Structural Analysis of Social Disorganisation and Crime in Rural Communities in Australia

This paper extends research on rural crime beyond North America by analysing associations between census measures of community structures and officially reported crime in rural New South Wales (Australia). It employs social disorganisation theory to examine variations in crime rates between different kinds of rural communities. A typology of rural communities was developed from cluster analysis of demographic, economic and social structural measures of rural local government areas (LGAs) in NSW. Six distinct types of rural communities were found to have unique crime characteristics. Structural measures were statistically associated with four types of crime. Overall, the findings support social disorganisation theory. Crime generally decreased across an urban-rural continuum, and more cohesive and integrated community structures had less crime. One highly disorganised type of small community had extremely high crime. These analyses demonstrate how specific structures of rural places are linked to rural crime

Introduction - There's crime out there, but not as we know it: Rural criminology - the last frontier

The idea that crime is a predominantly urban phenomenon has been pervasive in criminology, so much so that Australian criminology textbooks do not recognise rural crime as a distinct phenomenon worthy of scholarly attention (see Chappell & Wilson, 2000; Goldsmith et al, 2003; White & Haines, 2004; White & Habibis, 2005). There are no chapters or sections in Australian texts which specifically examine rural crime, despite the inclusion of a range of topics that appear to provide a broad coverage of crime in its many temporal and spatial dimensions. Nor is there so much as an index reference to "rural" issues in criminology textbooks. The standardised syllabus for crime texts provides coverage of topics such as violent crime, public crime, delinquency, race and crime, gender and crime, and crime and social class. This canon is mirrored in international texts, most of which also fail to address the issue of rural crime, but make abundant reference to crime in various urban contexts (see Carrabine et al, 2004; Conklin, 2004). This is not to suggest that Australian texts fail to localise their subject matter

Crime in Rural Australia

As an academic who has spent a quarter of a century living, lecturing and researching in a rural community, I am often impressed by the discrepancies between the reality of rural life and its image in the public consciousness. At least two aspects of this are the most striking. First, there is often - especially, but not exclusively in English-speaking societies - the idea that rural communities represent the "real" or "true" aspects of a society's culture. For example, judging by the representations of rural Australia in the media, rural life is where we find the true Australian, the laconic, taciturn, but decent everyday man and woman, the "battlers", who are not corrupted by urban life. Such an attribution of genuineness to rurality is especially interesting given that the vast majority of contemporary Australians live in cities and that Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Second, and following from the first point, is the idea that rural areas remain somewhat behind the times, that somehow they are not quite part of the contemporary world. This is a mixed image as it combines both the negative idea of backwardness with the more positive one of a society that has not lost the virtues of stability and civility that we often feel is missing in the city. Both of these ideas combine in the popular image of rural communities as safe places in an increasingly dangerous world. In the popular mind it seems that there is an idea that whatever rural communities may lack in conveniences and sophistication, they remain places where you might walk down the street safely, leave your doors unlocked at night and raise your children confident that they will not be exposed to drugs, gangs and violence. Unfortunately, all of these ideas are fantasies. There is no reason to believe that the residents of rural communities are anymore the truer representations of Australian culture than the average suburbanite