National Deviancy Symposium

The National Deviancy Symposium (or National Deviancy Conference) consisted of a group of British criminologists dissatisfied with orthodox British criminology who met at the University of York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The group included Paul Rock, David Downes, Laurie Taylor, Stan Cohen, Ian Taylor and Jock Young. Many members later became involved in critical criminology and/or Left realism.

The NDC was formed in July 1968, as a radical breakaway from the Third National Conference of Teaching and Research on Criminology at the University of Cambridge by seven individuals. These seven were Kit Carson, Stan Cohen, David Downes, Mary Susan McIntosh, Paul Rock, Ian Taylor and Jock Young.

Sir Leon Radzinowicz, one of the most important figures in post-war criminology in Britain, recounts the formation of the National Deviancy Symposium:

"I do not wish to end this account without mentioning a rather amusing episode. Right in the middle of the Third National (Criminology) Conference, taking place in Cambridge in July 1968, a group of seven young social scientists and criminologists, participants of the Conference, met secretly and decided to establish an independent 'National Deviancy Conference' and soon afterwards they duly met in York. At the time, it reminded me a little of naughty schoolboys, playing a nasty game on their stern headmaster. It was not necessary to go 'underground' because we were not in any way opposed to discussing new approaches to the sociology of deviance ... Although not invited to their conference in York I asked one of my senior colleagues in the Institute to go there as an observer.
"My attitude was by no means hostile or patronizing. As I stated at the time, movements in ideas, like life in general, often lead to seeming unexpected baffling results. Those were the years of dissent, protest and ferment in the United States with their unmistakable echoes in Britain. They affected not only the ways people acted, but also their thinking on many matters relating to social life and its reinterpretations. But it was also a reaction to some extent inevitable and to some extent misguided of the new generation of British criminologists against what appeared to be the stolid establishment of Criminology as personified by the Cambridge Institute and probably also by its first Director."

As Radzinowcz's account shows National Deviancy Conference was initially "deeply critical of the medico-psychological assumptions, social democratic politics, and atheoretical programme of what they termed 'positivist criminology'."

The group proceeded to organise 13 conferences between 1968 and 1973, publishing three sets of conference papers in the process.

The group also tried to provide a financial support and a forum for campaign groups around criminal justice, such as "the gay, women's, mental patients' and prisoners' movements" such as Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP), Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) and People not Psychiatry.

Of the group's biggest successes was helping to set up in 1974 the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Control.