This article tests social support theory with a focus on the relationship between general relief payments to the poor and homicide. General relief, a new and untapped measure of social support, represents an improvement on earlier measures of social support, such as welfare spending, because it (a) reflects local priorities, (b) includes both cash grants and in-kind services, and (c) is sufficiently variable at the local level to make it statistically useful. Data from Worrall (2005) were reanalyzed, revealing that general relief was inversely related to homicide, even in the face of various robustness checks.
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