“Taking the law into one’s own hands” via a do–it-yourself approach has been variously
named as street justice, frontier justice, curbstone justice, back-alley justice, and even
retaliatory justice. However, experts find that retaliation is not truly justice, as it goes
beyond what can be justified as self-defense. Victimologists, criminologists, and
government officials equate this behavior with the old-fashioned concept of vigilantism.
Vigilantism has a long and brutal history, beginning in the Old West as a reaction against
bands of desperadoes marauding along the frontier. In the Deep South, it took the form of
lynching. While lynch mobs often claimed to seek vengeance on behalf of victims, their
actions were often motivated by racism. Vigilantism also has strong political connections
to the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, some militia movement groups, and
other right-wing extremists. Lynch mobs rationalized their acts of violence with a
distortion of the idea that “the end justifies the means.”
Today, there is more controversy about vigilantism than actual implementation of it.
However, criminals commonly resort to vigilantism to settle disputes that they cannot bring
to law enforcement without incriminating themselves.
Those who respond to the emotional appeal of vigilantism as a solution to street crime do
not consider offender rehabilitation, offender restitution to victims, or offender-victim
reconciliation; instead, they consider only retaliation in kind as their definition of criminal
justice.
Two ideologies opposing the vigilante impulse constrain it: (1) law enforcement and
government officials reject vigilantism because professionals should control the criminal
justice process, not ordinary citizens, who are not experts; and (2) civil libertarians reject
vigilantism as overly swift, sure, and informal on-the-spot justice, which ignores due
process and other constitutional law and thus can involve mistaken identity and cause
false accusations and punishments of innocent people. The rights of both the victims and
the accused are ignored. Also, mobs in the heat of the moment inflict much harsher
punishment—often resulting in death—than the law typically would.
Although vigilantism has been described as taking the law into one’s own hands, vigilantes
do not take the law; rather, they break the law.