The Religious Institutional Base and Violent Crime in Rural Areas

Abstract

Research on the relationship between religion and crime has typically focused on individual religiosity and delinquency, or moral communities and crime at the macro level. This study extends prior research by delineating the sociological implications of a strong religious institutional base, and investigating the ties between the religious institutional base and violent crime across rural communities. Multivariate regression analysis of Uniform Crime Report data on violent crime, Census of Churches and Church membership data, and U.S. Census data circa 2000 reveal that rural violent crime rates on average are consistently lower where there are more churches per capita. This relationship holds net of the overall adherence rates, the presence of civically engaged religious adherents, and the presence of conservative Protestant adherents. Moreover, regional variations are evident, with the South and the Midwest-two highly religious regions of the country-sustaining most of the observed institutional effects.

Explaining Crime in Metropolitan and Non-Metropolitan Communities

“…in its annual Uniform Crime Reports. County-level data on crimes and arrests reported for the years 2003, 2004, and 2005 were obtained from the criminal justice data archive at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (FBI, 2005;2006;. The numbers of crimes or arrests and the populations covered in each year's statistics were combined into three-year average annual rates for each county.…”

“…Civic community variables were selected, following the prior measurement of these processes by Lee (Lee 2006(Lee , 2008Lee & Thomas 2010) and by Tolbert and Lyson (Tolbert, Irwin, Lyson, & Nucci 2002;Tolbert, Lyson, & Irwin 1998;Lyson, Torres, & Welsh 2001), to measure the central causal factors of: (1) residential investment in the community (percent of housing units that were owner-occupied), (2) civic engagement (percent voting in last presidential election), (3) participation in community institutions (mainline church membership rate), (4) locally-based small-scale capitalism (percent of working population that is self-employed) and (5) locally-based small-scale capitalism (percent of farms less than 50 acres). Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for each of the independent variables used in this analysis.…”

Social Disorganization and Rural/Urban Crime Rates: A County Level Comparison of Contributing Factors

“…In rural communities, the social networks based on the familiarity of residents may be especially important. Expressing this sentiment, Lee (2006) set forth the civic engagement hypothesis relating to informal social control in rural communities. Lee (2006) found the informal social control produced from religiosity of a community was associated with a decrease in crime.…”

“…Expressing this sentiment, Lee (2006) set forth the civic engagement hypothesis relating to informal social control in rural communities. Lee (2006) found the informal social control produced from religiosity of a community was associated with a decrease in crime. An important distinction exists between social disorganization and civic engagement, however.…”

How Rural Criminology Informs Critical Thinking in Criminology

“…The Seydlitz et al (1993) article was the beginning of a steady parade of published studies of rural communities and crime utilizing social disorganisation theory or a closely related variant (Barnett and Mencken 2002;Bouffard and Muftić 2006;Cancino 2005;Ceccato and Dolmen 2011;Deller and Deller 2010; Donnermeyer, Jobes and Barclay 2009;Jobes 1999;Jobes Barclay, Weinand and Donnermeyer 2004;Jobes, Donnermeyer and Barclay 2005;Kaylen 2010;Kaylen and Pridemore 2011Lee 2006Lee , 2008 Bartkowski 2004A, 2004b;Lee, Maume and Ousey 2003;Lee and Ousey 2001;Lee and Thomas 2010;Li 2012;Mencken and Barnett 1999;Osgood and Chambers 2000;Ousey and Lee 2010; Resig and Cancino 2004;Spano and Nagy 2005;Tunnell 2006; Weisheit 2004, 2012). To a great extent, this 2 Portions of this paper are from two sources: (1) …”