David Downes

David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist who is professor emeritus of social administration at the London School of Economics, where he was first appointed as an assistant lecturer in 1963. His book The Delinquent Solution: A Study in Subcultural Theory, based on fieldwork in London's East End, became a classic study in British criminology, and in 1968 he was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conference, a network that challenged mainstream criminology's treatment of deviance. He edited the British Journal of Criminology from 1985 to 1990 and in 1990 established the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics, named for the refugee criminologist Hermann Mannheim.