“The sharp decline in teen socializing during the 2010s is nearly identical to trends in teen robberies, burglaries, and thefts. Spanning back to the first year of data collection (1976), the correlation between teen socializing and crime rates among 15-19 year olds is relatively strong (burglary = .76; robbery = .74; larceny-theft = .92); this association is even closer when focusing specifically on the 2000 to 2020 period (burglary = .99; robbery = .92; larceny-theft = .98). Trends in teen socializing were relatively flat prior to the 2000s; only in the 2010s do we see a precipitous decline.

An almost identical pattern can be seen with another proxy for unstructured and unsupervised time with peers – teenage birth rates. These data represent the number of teen (age 15 to 19) births per 1,000 to unmarried mothers. This trend is closely associated with weekly socializing patterns reported in the ‘Monitoring the Future’ data from 2000 to 2020 (r = .98) and shares an similarly strong correlation with teen (15-19) burglary (r =. 99), robbery (r =. 96), and larceny-theft rates (r =. 98).”

From The Crime Forecast.