Variation in the Drug-Crime Relationship Across Rural-Urban Contexts

Abstract

In the past several decades, a significant amount of research has examined the relationship between substance or drug use and crime. Empirically, there appears to be a positive relationship between these phenomena, but the reasons for this are unclear. While scholars often focus on how individual characteristics may influence this relationship, there is emerging evidence that social context may matter as well. For example, the drug-crime relationship may not manifest in the same way or be as strong in some contexts given variables such as social norms and values, opportunity structures, and informal social controls. One such context that should be considered is rural areas. In these spaces, despite having a similar incidence of substance use to urban areas, other types of crime are comparatively low. Furthermore, patterns of substance use and crime diverge across these contexts in a variety of ways. It may be that different features of these areas, including environmental characteristics and social processes, help explain this patterning. Using the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2019), the current study examined whether the relationship between substance use (including alcohol) and delinquency is moderated by rural contexts. Differing levels of informal social controls or social bonds (parental attachment, school attachment, and religious involvement) in rural areas are proposed as a possible mechanism in this relationship, and their influence on the substance-delinquency relationship is assessed both independently and in combination with rural context to determine whether these variables explain any contextual variation. Findings suggest mixed support for the moderation of rural context. While those living in nonmetropolitan areas appear to have a weaker association between substance use and delinquency than their metropolitan counterparts, data and measurement issues reduce confidence in this finding. For instance, context may be related to how substance use relates to engagement in delinquency but not the extent of that delinquency. In contrast, those with higher levels of parental and school attachment exhibit a stronger relationship between substance use and delinquency; more highly attached individuals tend to engage in less delinquency when they use no or few substances, but they engage in similar levels and perhaps even more delinquency than their less attached peers as substance use variety increases. Finally, accounting for how rural context and informal social controls both may change the strength of the substance-delinquency relationship does not yield any substantially different results, indicating that the informal social controls examined in this study do not act as a mechanism of any contextual variation in this relationship. The findings of this research help fill the gap in the drug-crime literature concerning social context, contribute to the rural criminological literature regarding how crime manifests in these areas, and provide new evidence about the role of informal social controls in understanding the drug-crime relationship.