…What Russell Hogg and Kerry Carrington manage, in this painstakingly researched and well-documented study of crime in rural Australia, is to force us to revise all our inchoate images, stereotypes and understandings – of Australia, of crime and of the rural.
The strength of their study is that they manage to do this by ‘showing, not telling’, an injunction drummed into all aspiring novelists. This ‘showing’, by an impressive combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of statistical, ethnographic and secondary data, persuades us that their findings are robust and their critical theoretical starting point is necessary: crime is both a response to changing socio-political and economic realities (the ‘rural crisis’ of the book’s title) and a product of the ‘law and order’ reaction to crisis (the ‘policing’ of the title). – Tony Jefferson, Professor of Criminology, Keele University, UK – From the Foreword