Reacher and the vigilante: why vigilante justice fascinates us

A former military police officer with no fixed address steps off a bus in some random town, smells injustice in the air and, over eight episodes, corrects it with his fists. Season 4 of Reacher (Prime Video, August 2026) has once again placed Jack Reacher among the most-watched titles on streaming, and with him returns one of the oldest and most persistent fantasies in popular culture: the vigilante, the man who applies his own justice when he believes the law falls short. Reacher carries no badge and asks no judge for permission. And millions of viewers love him for precisely that reason.

The interesting question is not whether Reacher is right —it's fiction, and the script is written so that he is—. The question is why the vigilante fascinates us so much, and what happens when that fantasy of order is taken out of the television set and carried into the street. Criminology has answers for both, and they are not always the ones we would expect.

// The fantasyWhy the vigilante hypnotizes us

The appeal of the vigilante is, above all, emotional. We live surrounded by a diffuse sense that the system is slow, bureaucratic and often unjust: the obviously guilty person who walks free on a technicality, the powerful figure who never pays, the paperwork that never arrives. Reacher is the direct answer to that frustration. Where criminal proceedings hesitate, he acts; where there are nuances, he has certainties. He offers something the real world almost never gives: a clean, immediate and morally clear-cut resolution.

Added to that is the fantasy of agency. The vigilante is never a passive victim: he is competent, impossible to intimidate and always one step ahead. In a media environment saturated with threats —crime, corruption, chaos— projecting yourself onto someone who commands the situation is profoundly reassuring. The fictional vigilante does not just punish the bad guy: he embodies the illusion that order can be restored through willpower and force, without the discomforts of due process.

The genre also shields the viewer from the uncomfortable part. In fiction we know who is guilty because the script shows us; the violence always falls on whoever deserves it and never on a confused innocent. That guaranteed certainty is a luxury real life does not grant, and it is precisely what makes vigilantism so seductive on paper and so dangerous off it.

// The theoryWhat criminology says: order, deterrence and a heavy hand

The fantasy of the vigilante connects with a very real criminological current: right realism, associated above all with James Q. Wilson. Its starting point is that seeking the "root causes" of crime in poverty or society is, at best, an intellectual luxury that does not help tonight's victim. There are people who choose to break the law, weigh costs and benefits, and the victims of street crime are real and tend, moreover, to be poor. Criminal policy, this school holds, should focus on deterring, incapacitating and maintaining order.

From there comes its most influential idea, formulated with George Kelling: the theory of broken windows. A broken window that no one repairs, a graffiti that no one erases, send the signal that no one is watching there, and that signal invites more disorder and, over time, more serious crime. Tending to visible order —petty incivility— would be, by this logic, the best way to prevent the major kind. It is a thesis with serious parts: street crime matters, some of its policies work in the short term, and individual responsibility is a defensible moral principle, not an eccentricity.

Reacher is, in a way, right realism taken to its narrative extreme: deterrence embodied in a single body. He does not theorize about incentives; he applies them. The problem is that the series grants him something no real institution possesses: absolute certainty about who deserves the punishment.

// The flip sideWhen the vigilante steps off the television

This is where fiction and evidence part ways. Real vigilantism —what the criminological literature studies under labels such as self-help justice or extralegal justice— rarely resembles Reacher. First, it gets it wrong: without procedural safeguards, without a defense, without a burden of proof, the vigilante punishes on the basis of suspicions, rumors or prejudices. The history of lynchings is, precisely, the history of crowds convinced they were doing justice upon the innocent.

Second, it escalates violence. When punishment is dispensed by anyone who feels wronged, there is no way to stop the spiral: retaliation is followed by counter-retaliation. That is why the modern State was born, to a large extent, by monopolizing the legitimate use of force: not because power distrusts the citizen, but because delegating punishment to an impartial third party is the only thing that breaks the cycle of private revenge.

Third, and perhaps most uncomfortable, real vigilantism tends to punish the vulnerable. The same logic of "order" and "zero tolerance" that in the series falls upon thugs and traffickers, in the street tends to fall upon the poor, the migrant, the young person from a marginalized neighborhood, the different. The vigilante decides at a glance who "looks like" a criminal, and that glance is full of biases. The harshest criticism of right realism is exactly that: by ignoring the social causes of crime, it ends up managing its symptoms by coming down hard on the same people as always.

The KRIMINIS catalog is full of these fictional vigilantes, and not by chance. Judge Dredd is literally "the law" —judge, jury and executioner in a single figure—; Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry, embodies the cop who despises procedure; Vic Mackey shows the officer who crosses every line convinced he serves a greater good; and the Punisher is pure revenge elevated to a method. They are all magnetic. And they all illustrate, each in its own way, the blind spot of the fantasy: the certainty that one is oneself on the right side.