Home, Home on the Range

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1415015639692216699.post-56864268415522908392008-05-12T11:49:00.007-04:002008-05-12T12:12:36.714-04:002008-05-12T12:12:36.714-04:00Home, Home on the Range<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_ssBg_Q5bVuo/SChqesB0p3I/AAAAAAAAABQ/YPY44WlhzRk/s1600-h/hl.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 262px; height: 211px;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_ssBg_Q5bVuo/SChqesB0p3I/AAAAAAAAABQ/YPY44WlhzRk/s320/hl.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5199522845246662514" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ironrange.org/communities/hoyt-lakes/"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://www.ironrange.org/communities/hoyt-lakes/" alt="" border="0" /></a>When I graduated from high school in the mid-90s, life in my home town in northern Minnesota was, for the most part, stereotypically idyllic. While there is not much crime in most rural areas anyway, my small town had almost none. I went to college wanting to to do police work in this way of life. The cops I knew never arrested anyone – they simply drove around town “BS-ing” with the locals and talking about where the fish were biting or who shot the biggest deer this season. The year after I left, the taconite mine that literally built the town in the 50s unexpectedly and immediately shut down. Some of my classmates who had stuck around to live the lives their fathers had were shell-shocked when only a few months after signing 30-year mortgages they found out that their well-paying job had just been pulled out from underneath them. Many people speculated that the town would not make it. Taxes had been essentially paid by the mining company, and so there would be no money to fix roads and pay for teachers and cops (my parents still pay less than $200 PER YEAR for property taxes). As a result of the closure, many people left the town. Surprisingly, though, many people stayed. Many of the residents were retirees and could survive because of the low cost of living. Something even more surprising has happened in the last few years: the price of precious metals has increased so much that now other mining companies are talking about coming back to the Iron Range. One company has spent the last 3 years fixing up the facilities abandoned by the original mine. There are multi-million dollar building projects going on and hundreds of new jobs are forecasted. In fact, everyone is talking about this being the biggest economic boom for northeastern Minnesota in a generation. Seems like all good things for my childhood community. The question I want to pose here, is, what are the social (and criminological) implications of such a rapid change? The area went from boom to bust and now back to an apparent boom in the matter of only a few years. Sounds like classic anomie to me. There is a very good article in the <a href="http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/articles/index.cfm?id=66339&section=homepage">Duluth News-Tribune</a> this morning written by an economist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth about some of these issues. Tony Barrett writes: <blockquote>Face it, we’re in for several years of upheaval. Positive upheaval, for the most part, but upheaval nonetheless. Change does not come easily for anyone and the communities on the Range will be no different. </blockquote>Are we prepared for such changes and should we expect an increase in crime as a result? How will the life-long Rangers get along with those who come from elsewhere? What can we do NOW to prepare for the changes? There is very little analysis of rural crime issues in the literature, though it seems to me that this is a case study of how rapid social change can affect rural areas.Patchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17393250370819051216noreply@blogger.com2