But crime still lurks in most small towns. Children living in towns with a population under 50,000 are more likely than children living in medium to big cities to use drugs, according to a survey released in January by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York City. With more people in rural communities abandoning their small towns and farms in favor of jobs and services found in distant, bigger cities, the risk of crime grows. And all of those things tend to contribute to higher crime, which in turn contributes to a lowered perception of safety, which then also translates into less trust of neighbors. So it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle.
Many rural communities are subject to that today.
But as profiled in the book of test strategies, some state agencies, such as the Florida Department of Children and Families, are attempting to rebuild traditional small-town support networks. With about 268 caseworkers taking on 700 to 800 new cases of child neglect or abuse a month, the agency's Duval County office in the northwest corner of the state five years ago created its Community Partnership for the Protection of Children. The partnership pairs struggling parents with relatives, friends or community members who sign contracts promising to help raise the at-risk children. Some measures in the book are best suited for America's widest expanses. For example, rural theft cooperatives in California's San Joaquin Valley work with farmers to keep their equipment from being stolen.