The effects of plastic deformation on conformation and local packing in polycarbonate have been quantified using polarization-transfer and double-quantum NMR methods. To within experimental precision, the conformational distribution was found to be unaffected by the deformation, whereas small changes in the local packing of molecular segments could be detected. The phenylene ring planes exhibit a tendency of orienting parallel to one another upon deformation, and the pair correlation functions between the molecular segments under study increase in amplitude at short separations. The experimental results are compared to athermal atomistic simulations, and their implications with respect to proposed heuristic models of the process of plastic deformation in polymer glasses are discussed.