The prevalence and frequency of offending among a cohort of youth offenders during an exceptional event: a research note

Exceptional events bring with them exceptional consequences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most devastating exceptional events in recent memory, the lives and routines of millions of people around the world were significantly disrupted. Criminologists were quick to document the immediate and short-term effects of pandemic-related restrictions on recorded crime, with the meta-story being that most types of recorded crime declined beyond statistical expectations. However, in the aftermath of these discoveries, it has become clear that research focusing on young people and their offending has not garnered the same level of attention. To remedy this, the current paper uses officially recorded unit-record offence data from the state of New South Wales (NSW) to explore and document to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic has affected youth offending. With this data in hand, we estimate the prevalence and frequency of offending among this cohort of young people pre-and-post the introduction of COVID-19 restrictions. We find that throughout periods of lockdown restrictions in NSW, the prevalence and frequency of this cohorts offending declined significantly, and that most of these declines were clustered in property and violent offences. Interrupted time series analysis (ITSA) was conducted to confirm these findings, with statistical evidence suggesting the largest declines in prevalence and frequency occurred at the point of the first national lockdown in 2020 and the second state-wide lockdown in 2021. We end this paper by discussing why these findings are important and how they continue to shed light on the COVID-crime puzzle, specifically addressing the gap in research on youth offending during an exceptional event.