How Universal Is the Youth Crime Drop? Disentangling Recent Trends in Youth Offending through a Socio-economic Lens

Abstract

Recent research has consistently found declines in youth offending, and it has been suggested that youth offending may have become more concentrated in lower socio-economic communities. However, there has been limited empirical examination of this proposition. This study aimed to examine changes in the relative concentration of youth offending in low and high socio-economic communities in an Australian jurisdiction, from 2008 to 2018, and to explore socio-economic drivers of different types of youth offending over this period. Changes in offending concentration were measured using ratios of youth offending rates in low and high socio-economic communities over time and Poisson panel regressio..