While everyone is well aware that drugs, gangs and even murder are no longer problems relegated to the big cities, the next crime wave will see its biggest increase in rural and small town America. As major cities shrunk, a diaspora of criminals to virgin territory occurred. This is why you see many more shocking incidents of crime in these less heavily populated areas than you used to. It is common to hear people tell the media that they never would have expected such an incident to take place in their neighborhood. "It's very exciting to violate the law, though it can also lead to a kind of madness," said the rapper Ice-T.
Since these incidents are spread out over a larger geographical area, this crime trend is harder to spot. Also, most media organizations are concentrated in large cities and that's where their focus on crime lies. Part of this migration of criminals is a result of the concentration of police in major cities. Some criminals are smart enough to realize that if police saturate a neighborhood with their presence, they can in turn saturate small towns with few cops or resources to crack down on their dope peddling ways. Rather than cure the disease, it is being spread across America. One of the greatest ironies of our prison system is that guys who would have never ventured out of the city get an education of the geography of their state, as they get shuffled from prison to prison throughout their incarceration.
Just as poisonous attitudes and behaviors once spread block by block like a cancer throughout our cities, they have now flooded rural America. Before the crime surge in the late 1980's and early 1990's, gang banging and drug dealing became an entrenched part of city life. Children are easily influenced, regardless of where they are, and the same process of corruption that took place with our cities' youth can now be found across America.
Not only are rural youth experiencing the same change in attitudes that preceded earlier urban crime waves, but the economic downturn that rural America is experiencing is similar to what happened in our cities. This moral and economic vacuum creates the environment that allows simple gang banging and drug use to become much more serious criminal activity. People who were once on the periphery of criminal behavior find themselves sucked into a vortex that nobody can pull them out of. Parents struggling to make ends meet realize too late that they've lost their children. Their entire life's work rendered moot as their family is destroyed by forces they just realized existed.
Why is rural America repeating the exact same cycle that just recently devastated our cities? Did a feeling of moral superiority make rural America think it couldn't happen in their community. With the same materialistic and egocentric culture, rural America is fertile ground for the vices that were perceived as an exclusive element of city life.
Before blaming urban America, rural America must recognize that it was their political dominance that led to the crime legislation that avoided dealing with the problem. Republicans were content to let manufacturing leave America while a boom in prison building was replacing jobs that were lost in their districts. As rural America sees a rise in crime, hopefully they'll be smart enough to see that more laws, cops, and prisons won't solve the problem. President Obama should be more cognizant of the problems of urban America and should lead a policy shift that actually addresses the crime problem. However, one reason rural America was able to dictate crime policy for so long was because urban America refused to take the responsibility for the problem and push forth viable crime policies. Will that continue?
To get a better grasp on this issue, please read my book Essays of a Penitentiary Philosopher free at my web site www.crimeandculture.com, as well as my other blogs on crime related matters.
