ABSTRACT

In the middle of the 1960s, there were a number of young sociologists in Britain attracted to the then wholly American field in the sociology of deviance. The ideas in such works as Becker’s Outsiders and Matza’s Delinquency and Drift seemed to make sense across a whole range of teaching and research interests, particularly in ‘marginal’ areas such as drugs, sexual deviance, youth culture and mental illness. Official criminology was regarded with attitudes ranging from ideological condemnation to a certain measure of boredom. But being a sociologist – often isolated in a small department – was not enough to get away from criminology: some sort of separate subculture had to be carved out within the sociological world. So, ostensibly for these reasons (although this account sounds suspiciously like colour-supplement history), seven of us met in July 1968, fittingly enough in Cambridge in the middle of the Third National Conference of Teaching and Research, organised by the Institute [of Criminology] and opened by the Home Secretary. We decided to form a group to provide some sort of intellectual support for each other to cope with collective problems of identity. (Stan Cohen, 1981, p. 194)

This ‘intellectual support’ was to consolidate around the National Deviancy Conferences (NDC).1 As Stan Cohen recalls, the conferences were brought into being by a group of young academics who were both excited by the developments in North American radical sociology and disillusioned with the orthodox or establishment criminology as represented by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, under the directorship of Leon Radzinowicz. The Third National Conference of Teaching and Research on Criminology had been dominated by the views of the establishment, which were largely positivist in focus, concerned with the pathology of the offender. The seven founding individuals, who met as part of that breakaway faction at the Conference, were Stan Cohen, Kit Carson, Mary

McIntosh, David Downes, Jock Young, Paul Rock and Ian Taylor, all of whom became well known in the fields of criminology and the sociology of deviance. Leon Radzinowicz (1999) said of the NDC that, ‘at the time, it reminded me a little of naughty schoolboys, playing a nasty game on their stern headmaster’ (p. 229). He, unsurprisingly, was not invited to participate. Jock Young (2002) has described the NDC as ‘anarchistic and antinomian, set deep in the counter culture of the time’, and also ‘hectic, irreverent, transgressive and, above all, fun’ (p. 252). Between 1968 and 1973 there were 14 conferences producing an extraordinary outpouring of innovative work that was to ultimately transform the discipline of criminology in Britain. It attacked positivist and classicist discourses and was concerned with how the criminal justice system was selective and fundamentally flawed, particularly with respect to its focus on the crimes of the working class whilst ignoring those of the more powerful groups in society. In terms of explorations in the sociology of deviance there was an emphasis on youth and class, which generated papers, for example, on football hooliganism and working-class youth (Taylor, 1968), drug use (Young, 1968), hippies (Hall, 1970) and motorbike subculture (Willis, 1972). However, there were no restrictions in terms of discipline and, given this, there were important contributions to cultural studies, anti-psychiatry and the sociology of sexualities.