Growing Up Into A Rural Area

There are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz, tells a story about the family of LaJoe and Paul Rivers. The book focuses on Lafayette and Pharaoh, two of the younger children in the family, and their interactions with each other, the neighborhood, their family, their friends, and the police. Following the family over three years shows the importance of neighborhood factors when it comes to crime. According to Sampson and Groves (1989), social disorganization refers to “the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls”. Many aspects in the book exemplify how neighborhood factors, social controls, and community factors have impacts on crime. The book exemplifies how neighborhood disadvantage can lead to informal social controls, which in turn produces crime. Due to these factors, social disorganization is the best theory to explain the crime that occurs in There are No Children Here.

Growing up in the small town of Pocahontas, Iowa gives appreciation to the simplicity of tight-knit communities. With a population of 1,800 people, there is single café where local farmers enjoy a morning cup of coffee while discussing the news. Rural communities are a place where children have birthday parties at the local pizza place and teenagers’ first jobs are as detasslers. As a child, your mother knows if you got in trouble at school before you return home and everyone’s name is well known throughout the area.

Looking into the first relative community destroying idea, the reading focuses on how roads and droning subdivisions can make it not worth living in these places. On the note of how roads affect our community, it says that “One’s role in this environment is primarily as a motorist competing for asphalt” (41). In this opening, it really proved true to the circumstances I have experienced. Living in Tampa, all I remember is how much time we spent in a car or not outside because it wasn’t safe to really walk anywhere around us so we were

Growing up in rural North Carolina was both a blessing and a curse. My hometown, Fallston, North Carolina, is a tiny town way off the beaten path. Most people speak with a southern accent, are devout christians, vote Republican, think camouflage is a normal fashion pattern, and adore country music. But while I was a child, none of these things were a problem. I never realized how close-minded everyone was or how there were no opportunities for success; I was too concerned with the three most important events of the year: the Fallston FunFest, the Belwood Tractor Pull, and the Cleveland County Fair. However, as I grew older, zeal wore off and reality set in. I started to realize how conservative and restrictive it was. What little Fallston offered,

Kansas City born and raised in rural Indiana, I did not live and grow up in the same house as most kids around here do. I’ve moved twice in my lifetime and couldn’t be more grateful that we did. My family has made southern Indiana our home now for the last 15 years. I’ve played multiple sports here and with each sport I made more and more friends. When I go back to the city I was born in, I think about how different my life would’ve been if my parents hadn’t decided to move. I would have never gotten the chance to wake up and be surrounded by corn fields every day. I would never have been able to ride fourwheelers in my backyard, mow grass on a riding-mower, or even have a garden. There is privacy here, whereas neighbors in the city can see

“Small town big heart,” they say locked away behind their cold immaculate castle gates that rest on the remains of the previous farmland and plains. The collective heart beats but only at a convenient time suiting parties involved. “A place where everyone matters,” they utter as their motto in indistinguishable monotone voices. The people are too wrapped up in their everyday lives to ever be concerned about their neighbor, they look through life with gilded glasses. It’s as if a fog had descended slowly creeping into their view distorting what they once held most dear.

“The Heartland and the Rural Youth Exodus” written by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas take readers on a journey through the small towns of America that are located in the Midwestern states like Iowa. While on this journey Carr and Kefalas use facts, and organizational moves like a map that shows readers the out-migration of non-metro counties in the Midwest. They also use great tone in their persuasive speech by using words like death knell, poverty, and even cockeyed nostalgia to persuade their readers to look at the trouble these heartland states are going through. Throughout this entire book readers are encourage to look at the diminishing populations of small towns caused by young people leaving to go to the larger cities and why they are doing so. Many Americans are able to take a stake or claim in Carr and Kefalas’s book, but there is

Growing up in small-town Pflugerville, I never imagined what life would be like outside of a "country" area - until I moved to Killeen, Texas. Killeen is a town full of hot-headed, military, city-slickers that clog up the highway like ants. Often, I think of times when I was younger - looking up at the clear, blue, open skies; the smell of fresh-cut grass always awakened my senses. Now, I look up and I see wires, buildings, cars, and smog. They always say "There is no place like home," and in this case, there are no two places that differ more than my hometown and the town I live in now. The speed of life, the buildings, and most of all, the crime rates are all very new to me. The world is like bowl of fruit, sometimes the taste of each point on a map can differ as greatly as apples and oranges.

Living and growing up in a small town is better than doing so in a big city.

My understanding of underserved rural environments is limited to what I have read and what I have observed while visiting the Pacific Northwest and the Appalachian region. However, my familiarity with more urbanized underserved regions is much keener. I have discovered a common theme in many of these underserved areas.

When it comes to small towns people who haven’t lived in one tend to think that they are boring or bland. However a chat with some of the people who have always lived in a town of less than four-hundred people for their entire lives really paints a new picture. Donnie Moyer has lived outside of Terril, Iowa his entire life on a farm working for his father until his passing in which he took control of the property. When we discussed “How has the town change since you’ve lived here?” he responded with “It hasn’t change at all it's still the same place I grew up in.” Some see this as being bland but in today's age with all the technological change it is refreshing to see some are happy with their roots. Going on from that I asked him about his

I have lived in two distinct communities: the first was the town of Moraga, the second, is the city of Stockton. The former is the epitome of white picket fence suburbia, with friendly neighbors, a high ranking public school system, and a non-existent crime rate. Growing up in Moraga, I was able to receive a great education, roam around freely, and never feared horrors such as gang shootings and drug abuse. Sadly, when I moved to the latter, most of these horrors were apparent weekly.

Although the urban-rural divide in the state of Maine seems overwhelmingly prevalent on an economic and industry standpoint, these divides don’t really divide the people. The, “Two Maines,” are not in competition with one another, both centers encourage the advancement of the state collectively and promote the growth of the state as a whole rather than a single county or city. The betterment of Maine as a whole supersedes the advancement of any one place, and continuing the idea that there are, “Two Maines,” does nothing to actually address the problems that each of these unique places struggle

Wanting to extend the theory of social disorganization and crime beyond the scope of large urban cities, D. Wayne Osgood and Jeff M. Chambers released their study, Social Disorganization Outside the Metropolis: An Analysis of Rural Youth Violence, in order to “assess the generalizability to this setting of the social disorganization theory of crime that has been developed and tested in urban communities” (Osgood & Chambers, 2000). They hypothesize that rates of juvenile delinquency is positively related to residential instability, ethnic heterogeneity, family disruption, economic status, population density, and communities that are closer to urban areas (Osgood & Chambers, 2000). The sample contained 264 counties across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Nebraska that had populations ranging from 560 people to 98,000. The study was measured by the number of juveniles arrested (ages 11 through 17) between 1989 through 1993. They analyzed the arrests for homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, forcible rape, simple assault, weapons offenses, and the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) violence index.

There are many reason why city kids are more at risk in committing a crime than kids who live in the country. One of the reason is that the city environment contains many bad influences and negative people who can easily ruin the innocence of a kid’s life in the city. At a young age, kids are more influenced by the things around them, especially in the city where many gangs, sexual offenders, and violences lurk the city. Even at school where many kids from many different background can easily put a kid a risk in doing something illegal. For an example, if a bad kid that came from a violent family, he or she could influence other kids to be violent as well because many young kids in that age often wants to fit into some things in society. Which