The plurinormative control of street gangs : contributions of elite deviance studies to the understanding of the judicialization of street crimes

Edwin Sutherland was one of the first scholars to question the association between poverty and crime that dominated criminology in the early twentieth century. He suggested not only that criminology should study white-collar crimes but also that his theory of differential association was a general theory capable of explaining all types of criminal behaviour. In this article, we make a similar argument from a social reaction perspective. We draw from elite deviance studies to explain the social control of the most visible forms of crime, especially street crimes, and suggest that the concept of "privileged illegalities" (Acosta, 1988) is useful in analyzing how penal institutions react to all kinds of illegalities. Ultimately we argue that street crimes, similar to white-collar crimes, are governed though different normative systems (e.g. administrative law, civil law, etc.). This often results in the imposition of greater punishments, especially if the offender is foreign.