Southernness, migration, and homicide risk: An analysis of individual-level data

The regional culture of violence literature has neglected the effect migration out of the South has on individual-level homicide risk. The present paper tests the hypothesis that moving away from the South reduces exposure to a relatively large class of motivated offenders and lowers the risk of homicide victimization to non-Southern levels. The data come from the National Mortality Detail File and include 2,647 homicides and 403,184 natural deaths. A multivariate logistic regression analysis shows that migration out of the South does not normalize homicide risk. Thus, former Southerners continue to remain at a relatively high risk of homicide victimization in spite of relocating to a safer environment. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1998. Data were provided by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.