While most researchers see the urban setting as being the only laboratory for studying crime problems throughout the United States, Crime and Policing in Rural and Small-Town America directly challenges this notion with an authoritative look at crime and the criminal justice system in rural America today. The assumption that rural crime is rare and comparable across various communities has led to incompatible theories and irrelevant practices. In order to transform this misconstruction, the Third Edition offers a clear outline of the definition of rural and provides a vital argument for why rural and small-town crime should be studied more than it is. The book also explores the individual nature of issues that emerge in these communities, including illegal drug production, domestic violence, agricultural crimes, rural poverty, and gangs, in addition to the training needs of rural police, probation in rural areas, and rural jails and prisons. Responding to rural crime requires an awareness of its context and how justice is carried out, as well as an appreciation of how features vary across rural areas. Understanding the relationships among crime, geography, and culture in the rural setting can reveal useful ideas and implications for crime and justice in communities across the United States.

Rural crime is a fast growing area of interest among scholars in criminology. From studies of agricultural crime in Australia, to violence against women in Appalachia America, to poaching in Uganda, to land theft in Brazil -- the criminology community has come to recognize that crime manifests itself in rural localities in ways that both conform to and challenge conventional theory and research. For the first time, Rural Criminology brings together contemporary research and conceptual considerations to synthesize rural crime studies from a critical perspective. This book dispels four rural crime myths, challenging conventional criminological theories about crime in general. It also examines both the historical development of rural crime scholarship, recent research and conceptual developments. The third chapter recreates the critical in the rural criminology literature through discussions of three important topics: community characteristics and rural crime, drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context, and agricultural crime. Never before has rural crime been examined comprehensively, using any kind of theoretical approach, whether critical or otherwise. Rural Criminology does both, pulling together in one short volume the diverse array of empirical research under the theoretical umbrella of a critical perspective. This book will be of interest to those studying or researching in the fields of rural crime, critical criminology and sociology.

Crime is often perceived as an urban issue rather than a problem that occurs in rural areas, but how far is this view tenable? This book explores the relationship between crime and community in rural areas and addresses the notion of safety as part of the community dynamics in such areas. Rural Crime and Community Safety makes a significant contribution to crime science and integrates a range of theories to understand patterns of crime and perceived safety in rural contexts. Based on a wealth of original research, Ceccato combines spatial methods with qualitative analysis to examine, in detail, farm and wildlife crime, youth related crimes and gendered violence in rural settings. Making the most of the expanding field of Criminology and of the growing professional inquiry into crime and crime prevention in rural areas; rural development; and the social sustainability of rural areas, this book builds a bridge by connecting Criminology and Human Geography. This book will be suitable for academics, students and practitioners in the fields of criminology, community safety, rural studies, rural development and gender studies.

Criminology has until recently neglected the nature and levels of crime outside the urban realm. This is not a surprise as crime tends to concentrate in urban areas and the police directs resources where the problems are. Yet, there are many reasons why scholars, decision-makers and society as a whole should care about crime and safety in rural areas. This book highlights 20 reasons why crime and safety in rural areas is a topic of relevance. We attempt to untangle currently simplistic views of the rural by discussing a number of facets of the countryside as both safe and criminogenic, and more importantly, a hybrid place worth to be examined in its own right. We adopt the notion of a rural-urban continuum that captures the nuances of places of varied nature, spanning from remote and desolate spaces to accessible and connected environments of the urban fringe. Areas on the rural-urban continuum may be in constant transformation given local and global influences, which imposes challenges for policing and long-term social sustainability. Then, the book critically reviews a rich body of English-language literature in rural criminology that extends over more than four decades—a scholarship that has engaged researchers and practitioners in all continents. The books finishes with a discussion of the emergent research questions of the field, and offers implications for practice and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Using the notion of ‘crossroads’ to provide a unique lens through which to examine the realities of rural crime, Crossroads of Rural Crime provides an understanding of the nature of rural life and ways in which transgression manifests itself in the context of a presumed rural-urban divide.

49% of the world’s population lives in small towns, villages and farms, yet until recent years criminological scholarship has focused almost exclusively on urban crimes. The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology is the first major publication to bring together this growing body of scholarship under a single cover. For many years rural criminology has remained marginalized and often excluded from the mainstream, with precedence given to urban criminology: this volume intends to address that imbalance. Pioneering in scope, this book brings together leading international scholars from fourteen different countries to offer an authoritative synthesis of theoretical and empirical literature. This handbook is divided in to seven parts, each addressing a different aspect of rural criminology: Rurality and crime Criminological dimensions of food and agriculture Violence and rurality Drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context Intersections between rural and green criminology Policing, justice and rurality Teaching rural criminology Edited by a world renowned scholar of rural criminology, this book explores rural crime issues in over thirty-five countries including Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Australia, Tanzania, the US, and the UK. This is the first Handbook dedicated to rural criminology and is an essential resource for criminologists, sociologists and social geographers engaged with rural studies and crime.

This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality—and of peasants—with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.