Crime, Rurality and Community
| Published date | 01 August 1998 |
| Author | Russell Hoggt,Kerry Carrington |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486589803100204 |
| Date | 01 August 1998 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Crime, Rurality and Community*
Russell Hoggt and Kerry Carringtont
Criminology has tended
to
treat crime
as
predominantly an urban
phenomenon. Areview
of
the available, albeit rather limited, empirical
evidence regarding crime
and
law and order in rural New South
Wales
(NSW) raises some doubts about the urban-centric focus
of
criminology and
opens up arange
of
other interesting questions concerning the differential
social construction
of
crime problems
in
some rural localities,
in
particular
the tendency
to
racialise questions
of
crime and law and order. Rather than
simply developing an empirical and theoretical account
of
urban/rural
differences, however, the paper suggests aconceptual framework for local
and
regional studies drawing on the work
of
Norbert Elias and Robert
Putnam.
Introduction
In the conclusion to his essay on 'Environmental criminology' in The Oxford
Handbook
of
Criminology, Tony Bottoms refers to the influence
of
'differing
environments upon various aspects
of
criminal behaviour' and comments:
Apparently one
of
the most obvious
of
such influences is whether one lives in an
urban
or
arural environment, and criminological data
of
all kinds
...
consistently
support the view that rates
of
crime and criminality in these differing kinds
of
community are very different indeed.
Yet,
in any serious sense, this must be one
of
the most under-studied topics in criminology
...
'(Bottoms 1994:648)
That crime is predominantly an urban phenomenon has long been taken as
atruism within criminology (cf Shaw &McKay 1931; Shaw 1931; Baldwin
&Bottoms 1976; Felson 1994; Ladbrook 1988). It has spawned avast body
of
research and theorising stretching back at least to the Chicago school. This
may help explain the other fact noted by Bottoms, the substantial failure
within criminology to undertake research on crime in rural settings which
might sustain (or refute) this assumption. It seems the difference is so obvious
it has required little or no empirical verification; or (what amounts to the same
thing) rural crime problems have been implicitly treated as simply
'a
small-scale version'
of
the urban crime problem (cf Weisheit et al 1996:1).
Recent studies
of
rural crime in Australia give pause to question the
obviousness
of
this criminological truism and begin to fill the gap in
knowledge referred to by Bottoms
(cf
O'Connor &Gray 1989). There is also
asubstantial body
of
historical evidence which questions the assumption that
urbanisation invariably leads to rising crime rates (Johnson &
Monkkonnen 1996).
This paper questions criminology's urban-centric focus. It points to some
empirical evidence from NSW which confounds the common assumption that
*Received: 4August 1997; accepted in revised fonn: 5January 1998
tSenior Lecturer, Law School, Macquarie University.
tSenior Lecturer in Criminology, Faculty
of
Social Inquiry, University
of
Western Sydney
(Hawkesbury).
160
Crime, Rurality and Community
161
crime and urbanisation go hand in hand.
We
also review some other empirical
features
of
rural law and order politics in parts ofNew South Wales. However,
the predominant focus is conceptual rather than empirical. And in seeking
to
address the criminological neglect of rural crime noted by Bottoms
we
nevertheless remain skeptical
of
an analytical framework tied to the
production
of
generalisations about urban/rural differences. Instead we argue
for the value
of
applying Robert Putnam's idea
of
'civic context' to local
studies
of
crime in both rural and urban settings. This approach drawn from
political sociology has the virtue
of
encompassing an analysis
of
the local
culture and apparatus
of
social control
as
avariable force in the historical
shaping and contemporary construction
of
crime and social order.
Some methodological issues
Any discussion
of
rural crime raises at least four methodological issues. First,
what is denoted by the term 'rural'? There are many possible definitions
(Wirth 1956, 1969; Weisheit et al 1996:appendix B). Demographic definitions
emphasise population numbers, density and perhaps geographic isolation. For
economists, land use -agricultural, pastoral, extractive, and so on -provide
the·distinctive bases
of
(different) forms of rural life. Rural areas are also
administrative and political units designated for avariety
of
bureaucratic and
governmental purposes. Intuitive understandings of rurality typically project
further images and values, those
of
wholeness, reciprocity, intimacy,
informality and cohesion. The term is often used
to
simply refer to all areas
outside designated metropolitan centres. This typically results in
no
distinction being drawn between towns of vastly differing size or between
country towns and out-of-town life or between areas adjacent to large cities
and areas that are geographically isolated from them. Even confining
discussion to the narrowly spatial and demographic, the urban/rural distinction
emerges as aremarkably blunt conceptual tool, and quite unrevealing about
the variety
of
forms and patterns
of
human settlement.
Sociological critics
of
the distinction (such
as
Pahl (1968) and Gans (1968))
point to asecond, closely related, problem. They argue that it lacks
sociological salience, that little useful understanding
of
human behaviour and
social organisation is deducible from patterns
of
physical or spatial settlement
per
see
Louis Wirth recognised this long ago when he argued that 'urbanism
as
away
of
life' was by no means confined
to
cities (1938, 1969:143-4).
Rather the city is
to
be seen
as
'
...
not only increasingly the dwelling place
and the workshop ofmodern man, but it is the initiating and controlling center
of
economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote
communities of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and
activities into acosmos' (Wirth 1938, 1969: 144). Contrasts between
geographically distinct communities diminuish
as
human activities are subject
to
coordination and administration across increasingly vast tracts of space,
what Marx referred to
as
the 'annihilation of space by time' (quoted
by
Davison 1993:50) and Giddens more recently called the 'acceleration in
time-space distanciation' inaugurated by modernity (Giddens 1991:18). The
mass migrations ofpeoples, the huge expansion of world trade and the advent
of
global information technologies appear
to
emphatically confirm the point.
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