ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak is a special situation for the modern world. It represents the first time that a pandemic has affected every country in the world. In the first months of 2020, countries were forced to introduce restrictions that led to the freezing of entire nations, both economically and socially. The forced shutdown of economies and the resulting rupture of supply chains, remote working brought on by the situation, and for many, the loss of jobs could not help but shake the foundations of how modern societies function. The COVID-19 pandemic has been and continues to be primarily a humanitarian crisis, but it has also created very significant socio-economic implications that will likely impact the protracted global recession. Both the selected theories of social change, transformation, and globalization that we described in the first part of this book and the selected crime trends in Poland over the past three decades described in the second part of the book point to strong connections between the economic situation and the dynamics and structure of crime. Crime, as a social phenomenon, was also incapable of avoiding the impact of COVID-19.
