“Johnny Come Lately” – An Essay on Latter-Day Myths about Rural Crime and Justice Studies

“Johnny Come Lately” is a colloquialism with roots backs to nineteenth century British maritime days. It is used here to illustrate the recent emergence of new myths about rural crime and justice studies. As rural crime and justice studies have emerged and grown over the previous 50-plus years, a number of scholars have discussed and debunked myths about crime and rurality, but unfortunately, new falsehoods have been purposively created of late. In this paper, each latter-day myth is described, debunked and then transformed into positive directives about the future of rural crime and justice studies, following the example set by Ceccato and Abraham (2022). These positives include: (1) there must be a sustained effort to make the location for rural crime studies and the scholars who do the research and theorizing ever more diverse; (2) rural crime studies, both old and new, must be made more easily accessible to this generation and future generations of scholars, practitioners and policy-makers alike; (3) rural crime studies must continue to improve theoretical sophistication through application, critique, and revision, and through theoretical interpretation of previously published empirical work; and (4) a thorough synthesis of the rural crime and justice studies literature is imperative to its future development.