Editor’s note: The trailer above is provided for context. This essay critiques the film’s portrayal of Jeffrey Manchester and its impact on public perceptions of accountability.
Key takeaways
- “Roofman” turns a serial robber into a sympathetic anti-hero — replacing accountability with charm and entertainment.
- The film’s rationalizations mirror those corrections professionals challenge daily — “nobody got hurt,” “I had my reasons,” “I’m not like real criminals.”
- By erasing victims and softening harm, Hollywood distorts public understanding of crime and rehabilitation.
- These portrayals make accountability work harder inside facilities, giving offenders and families cultural permission to minimize responsibility.
- Moral clarity isn’t cruelty — it’s the foundation of real justice for victims, offenders and the professionals who serve both.
By Russ Hamilton
Why do we keep celebrating criminals like rock stars? The answer reveals itself with painful clarity in “Roofman,” a film starring Channing Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester — a serial armed robber known as the “Rooftop Robber” who terrorized dozens of victims, manipulated a vulnerable family and escalated to violent assault. Marketed as a comedy and dressed in the legitimacy of “based on a true story,” the film systematically makes light of crime, criminals and their victims by removing the material context that would make celebration impossible.
For correctional officers, particularly those working in reentry and rehabilitation, the pattern is achingly familiar. Manchester’s rationalizations — corporate victims don’t count, circumstances justify choices, politeness mitigates violence and “I’m not like real criminals” — are identical to the cognitive distortions professionals encounter daily in institutional settings. The difference is that Hollywood turns these pathological thinking patterns into character depth, providing cultural validation for the exact accountability-avoidance that undermines both institutional safety and genuine rehabilitation efforts.
The film wants audiences to like Tatum’s Manchester despite overwhelming evidence they shouldn’t. It attempts balance but misses the mark entirely, divorced from the reality corrections professionals cannot escape: charm is often predation, circumstances are context not justification and every crime has material consequences the camera never captures.
From the moment the film started, I could see what the studio was trying to do — make Jeffrey Manchester the protagonist, maybe even an anti-hero audiences could root for. They got him all dolled up, put Channing Tatum’s star power behind him and turned him loose on the big screen for a rousing performance. But just like a rockstar without a voice, the show fell flat. Tatum wasn’t missing his voice — Manchester was missing any redeeming features that would make him worthy of being liked.
A comprehensive catalog of destruction
Jeffrey Manchester’s criminal career represents an absolute wrecking ball to everyone in his orbit. Understanding the full scope of harm he caused — and how the film systematically minimizes that harm — is essential to grasping what’s at stake when we celebrate such criminals.
The McDonald’s employees: Terror transformed into comedy
Between 1998 and 2000, Manchester committed approximately 40-60 armed robberies of McDonald’s restaurants across the United States. His method was consistent and calculated: cut through the roof after hours, drop into the restaurant, force employees to comply at gunpoint, take them hostage and lock them in walk-in freezers while he emptied the safes. Under any reasonable legal analysis, this constitutes armed robbery, hostage-taking, and technical kidnapping — holding people against their will under threat of lethal force.
The film lingers on one humanizing detail: Manchester gave a manager a coat before locking him in the freezer. We’re meant to see this as evidence of his essential decency, his politeness, his reluctance to cause unnecessary suffering. The gesture is presented as proof that he’s not a “real” criminal, not truly dangerous, fundamentally different from those who would commit such crimes without compassion.
Jeffrey Manchester’s criminal career represents an absolute wrecking ball to everyone in his orbit.
In corrections work, particularly in reentry programs where developing genuine accountability is paramount, we recognize this gesture for exactly what it is: offender image management. The coat doesn’t erase the gun. The momentary concern doesn’t erase the calculated terrorism that preceded and followed it. This is a manipulation tactic designed to control how victims perceive their victimizer, potentially making them less likely to resist, more likely to comply and possibly even sympathetic enough to provide less damaging testimony later.
It’s a rationalization professionals hear constantly from inmates: “I wasn’t as bad as I could have been, therefore I’m not really bad.” “I never actually hurt anyone.” “I made sure they were comfortable.” These statements position the offender as somehow morally superior to other criminals, creating a hierarchy where their choices seem more acceptable, more justified, less deserving of full accountability.
Hollywood mistakes this manipulation for character depth. Corrections professionals recognize it as cognitive distortion that must be challenged, not celebrated.
His daughter: Justification masquerading as motivation
The film establishes Manchester’s initial crimes through a justification narrative that should disturb anyone working in criminal justice: he’s a combat veteran struggling financially who couldn’t afford his daughter’s desired birthday present. The emotional manipulation is deliberate — what parent hasn’t felt the pain of disappointing a child due to economic limitations?
But this is moral inversion of the highest order. Millions of American parents face economic hardship daily. They work multiple jobs, they save incrementally, they find creative solutions, or they learn to explain limitations to their children with honesty and love. What they don’t do is launch multi-year campaigns of armed robbery that will ultimately result in arrest at that same daughter’s next birthday party, traumatizing her with the spectacle of her father being taken away and abandoning her to grow up with a father in prison until she’s an adult.
Manchester’s daughter is presented as motivation for his crimes when she’s actually his first victim. His choices robbed her of a present father, a stable childhood, and the ability to grow up without the stigma and trauma of having an incarcerated parent. The film’s framing suggests he committed crimes for her when he actually committed them at her expense.
The combat veteran angle adds another layer of moral camouflage. The film mentions his military service as if it explains or partially excuses his criminal trajectory. PTSD is real, serious, and deserving of comprehensive treatment and support. But it doesn’t create the kind of calculated, repeated, antisocial behavior Manchester demonstrated over years.
Those working with veteran populations in correctional settings understand the importance of distinguishing between context and justification. Manchester’s service provides context for understanding his life circumstances. It does not justify terrorizing dozens of workers at gunpoint. The film deliberately blurs this critical distinction, using his military background as moral camouflage that obscures rather than illuminates accountability.
The Wainscott family: Predation dressed as romance
After his conviction and lengthy prison sentence, Manchester escaped from Brown Creek Correctional Institution by hiding under a delivery truck leaving the facility. Rather than fleeing far from the area, he took refuge in a Charlotte, North Carolina Toys “R” Us, where he lived secretly for approximately six months in a hidden space behind a bike rack, surviving on baby food and candy while using baby monitors to track employee movements.
During this time, he cultivated a relationship with Leigh Wainscott, a divorced mother and Toys “R” Us employee, using complete fabrication about his identity. Operating under the alias “John Zorn,” he joined Crossroads Presbyterian Church, integrated himself into the community, and systematically built a relationship with Leigh and her daughters. The girls developed deep, meaningful attachments to him. By all accounts, the relationship appeared genuine to everyone involved — except it was built entirely on lies and deception.
The film frames this as a romantic subplot, complete with Kirsten Dunst’s sympathetic performance that makes Leigh’s affection for Manchester seem natural and earned. What it minimizes is the profound predation at work. This wasn’t romance. It was systematic exploitation of a vulnerable family for his own needs.
Consider what Manchester knew that the Wainscotts didn’t: He was an escaped felon. He would eventually be caught. His capture would destroy their sense of safety, trust and normalcy. The daughters would lose another father figure to incarceration, compounding any abandonment issues from their parents’ divorce. Leigh would face public humiliation, scrutiny and questions about how she didn’t know. Their normal lives would be utterly shattered. He knew all of this. Every single day, for months, he chose his needs — hiding, companionship, a simulacrum of normal life — over their well-being.
What the film rarely asks us to consider is the wreckage Jeffrey Manchester was knowingly creating.
The film asks us to empathize with his loneliness, his desire for human connection, his yearning for family and normalcy. These feelings may be genuine — antisocial personalities are capable of genuine feelings even as they cause profound harm to others. What the film rarely asks us to consider is the wreckage he was knowingly creating, the timer he knew was counting down, the devastation he understood was inevitable.
That Leigh Wainscott visited Manchester a few times after his trial and conviction doesn’t redeem this relationship — it demonstrates how thoroughly he manipulated her, creating bonds powerful enough to persist even after the complete revelation of his deception and the destruction it caused. Those working with offender populations in reentry and rehabilitation settings recognize this pattern intimately: inmates whose victims still defend them, still visit, still maintain that the relationship was “real” despite overwhelming evidence of calculated manipulation.
This isn’t evidence of the offender’s essential goodness or the authenticity of feelings expressed. It’s evidence of manipulation so successful it outlasts the crime itself, creating psychological bonds that victims struggle to break even when intellectually they understand they were exploited. The film presents this as romantic devotion. Corrections professionals recognize it as the aftermath of predatory behavior.
The final victims: Escalation to violence
Manchester’s criminal story culminates with another hostage situation at the Toys “R” Us, this time with even more serious consequences. He takes multiple people hostage at gunpoint, badly injures a security guard and forces the store manager to zip-tie other workers. This represents clear escalation from property crime to violent crime, from theoretical threat to actual physical harm inflicted on another human being.
This progression is textbook antisocial behavior patterns. The boundaries keep expanding, the willingness to cause harm increases and the justifications adjust to accommodate more serious violations. Yet the film maintains its sympathetic framing throughout, presenting his violence as desperation rather than pattern, as circumstantial rather than characteristic of antisocial progression that professionals recognize as increasingly dangerous.
The security guard — whose name we likely never learn, whose injuries we don’t follow, whose family’s trauma remains invisible, whose recovery process is never depicted — becomes mere collateral damage in Manchester’s redemption narrative. This is victim erasure in its purest form: a real human being suffering real harm reduced to a plot point in someone else’s story.
The complete rationalization template
What makes “Roofman” particularly insidious from a corrections perspective is how comprehensively it provides a template for every rationalization professionals work daily to dismantle. The film doesn’t just depict these cognitive distortions — it validates them, presenting them as reasonable responses to circumstance rather than as pathological thinking requiring correction.
“I had my reasons": The film establishes difficult childhood circumstances, economic desperation, combat trauma and a desire to provide for family as explanations for Manchester’s choices. These are all real factors worthy of understanding as context — but the film deliberately blurs the crucial line between explanation and justification, between understanding and excusing.
In reentry work, this distinction is fundamental. Context helps us comprehend the path that led to crime, the factors that influenced choices, the circumstances that created vulnerability or opportunity. This understanding is essential for developing effective intervention strategies and support systems. But context never erases accountability for choices made. Explanation is not the same as excuse. Understanding why someone committed crimes doesn’t mean those crimes become acceptable.
The film treats context as justification, suggesting that if audiences understand Manchester’s circumstances sufficiently, his actions become if not acceptable then at least forgivable, sympathetic, understandable in a way that minimizes culpability.
Manchester is presented as categorically different from “real criminals” — more thoughtful, more principled, more deserving of sympathy.
“Nobody really got hurt": The corporate victimology problem runs throughout “Roofman” like a thread holding the moral camouflage together. McDonald’s and Toys “R” Us are presented as faceless corporate entities whose losses are insured and therefore insignificant. The abstraction of harm is complete — we’re invited to see these crimes as essentially victimless because no individual person suffered financial loss.
This cognitive distortion is pervasive in correctional settings. Inmates who committed fraud against banks insist they didn’t hurt “real people.” Those who robbed corporate retailers argue the company “could afford it.” Embezzlers from large organizations claim their victims were insurance companies, not individuals. The pattern is consistent: when victims can be conceptualized as abstract entities rather than human beings, accountability becomes negotiable.
The material reality the film ignores: Terrified McDonald’s employees locked in freezers at gunpoint don’t care that the corporation is insured. The young woman who can’t work closing shifts anymore without panic attacks isn’t comforted by McDonald’s market capitalization. The single mother who needs therapy to manage PTSD symptoms triggered by her robbery experience doesn’t benefit from knowing the financial loss was absorbed by a large entity.
The corporation absorbed the financial loss. The human beings absorbed psychological trauma that may never fully heal. The film erases the latter to focus on Manchester’s charm, systematically abstracting harm until it disappears entirely from moral consideration.
“I’m not like real criminals": Manchester’s politeness, his self-imposed rules about not hurting people (a rule he eventually violates), his selectivity about targets, his expression of remorse — these all create a hierarchy in which his crimes seem more acceptable than those of other offenders. He’s positioned as fundamentally different, more sympathetic, less culpable, more deserving of understanding and second chances.
This cognitive distortion is perhaps the most universal in institutional settings. Inmates create elaborate distinctions between their crimes and those of other offenders, always positioning themselves closer to innocent, justified, understandable. The child molester looks down on the rapist. The robber looks down on the burglar who violated homes. Everyone maintains they’re not a “real criminal” like the others, that their circumstances were unique, that they deserve special consideration.
The film endorses rather than challenges this thinking. Manchester is presented as categorically different from “real criminals” — more thoughtful, more principled, more deserving of sympathy. This validates the exact hierarchical thinking that prevents genuine accountability and personal transformation.
Cinema devoid of material context
The fundamental structural problem with “Roofman” and films like it is that cinema operates by systematically removing material context — the tangible, consequential reality surrounding criminal acts. This isn’t accidental or incidental to filmmaking. It’s essential to making criminal narratives entertaining rather than unbearable.
When audiences watch Channing Tatum charm his way through 40 robberies, they’re insulated from what those crimes actually entailed in material reality. They don’t experience the freezer’s cold penetrating clothing while locked inside with no certainty of when release will come. They don’t feel the gun’s weight or the terror of having one pointed at them by someone whose intentions are unknowable. They don’t live with the racing pulse that returns every time they work a closing shift months or years later. They don’t experience the years of therapy needed to manage PTSD symptoms. They don’t feel the family’s financial burden when the victim can’t work night shifts anymore due to panic attacks.
But what cinema omits isn’t limited to victim context. What the film conveniently leaves out about Manchester himself reveals the deliberate construction of moral camouflage.
The substance abuse omission: What made the story unbelievable
From the moment I started watching “Roofman,” something felt off about Manchester’s story as presented. The pattern of behavior, the impulsivity, the escalation — my professional instincts kept asking questions the film never answered. Where was the substance abuse history?
It’s not cynicism. It’s professional competence. When you work daily with the population I do — inmates preparing for reentry, people cycling through the system, offenders at various stages of accountability development — you develop an ear for what’s missing from someone’s narrative. You learn to listen not just for what’s said but for what’s conspicuously absent. Manchester’s story as told felt incomplete precisely because it omitted what experience tells you is likely there.
Prison records eventually confirmed my suspicion: Manchester’s last disciplinary infraction was for substance possession in April 2020 — 15 years into his sentence. While the specific substance isn’t public record, the infraction itself tells me everything I need to know about ongoing struggles with impulse control and rule adherence even within the highly controlled prison environment where access is severely limited and consequences are immediate.
For those working in reentry and rehabilitation, films like “Roofman” create concrete, measurable obstacles to the work of developing genuine accountability.
I suspect the filmmakers left this out to make Manchester more relatable, to avoid having to “rehabilitate his character” for audiences who might be less sympathetic to someone with active addiction issues. Substance abuse complicates the clean narrative of “desperate father driven to crime by circumstances.” It suggests deeper pathology that can’t be resolved with a single dramatic realization or emotional breakthrough. It makes rehabilitation harder to believe and redemption less cinematically satisfying.
But here’s the irony: the omission made him less relatable to me, not more. When you work with this population every day, you recognize the difference between an honest accounting and a curated narrative. The film felt exactly like sitting across from an inmate who’s telling me his carefully edited version of events, strategically omitting what complicates sympathy. I’ve heard this performance hundreds of times: emphasize the circumstances, highlight the regret, minimize the substance abuse, ignore the pattern of escalation and present yourself as fundamentally different from “real criminals.”
The film does precisely what the offender does, and for precisely the same reason: to maximize sympathy while minimizing accountability.
I can understand substance abuse issues. I have genuine empathy for someone struggling with addiction — it’s a disease that compounds every other challenge an offender faces, that impairs judgment and impulse control, that creates cycles of self-destructive behavior incredibly difficult to break. Those struggling with substance use disorders still deserve treatment, support, comprehensive intervention and pathways to recovery. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, approximately 63% of jail inmates and 58% of prison inmates have diagnosable substance use disorders. This isn’t a moral failure — it’s a public health crisis playing out inside our correctional facilities.
But empathy doesn’t mean abandoning accountability. Understanding why someone commits crimes doesn’t make those crimes acceptable or the victims less harmed. Recognizing addiction as a disease doesn’t erase responsibility for choices made while under its influence. In reentry work, we have to hold both truths simultaneously: addiction is real and deserving of compassionate treatment AND individuals must still be held accountable for harm caused regardless of the substances influencing their behavior.
When an offender demonstrates ongoing substance abuse even while incarcerated — where one would expect either forced sobriety or at minimum heightened motivation to maintain clean conduct for parole consideration — it raises serious questions about rehabilitation progress, treatment engagement and release readiness. Prison infractions for substance possession 15 years into a sentence aren’t minor details that can be overlooked in favor of a more sympathetic narrative. They’re red flags indicating persistent issues with rule adherence, impulse control, possibly self-medication of underlying mental health conditions and potentially insufficient engagement with available treatment resources.
In this situation, the writer simply pretended the issue didn’t exist. That’s not empathy, that’s erasure. And it’s exactly what offenders do when they’re avoiding accountability — they edit out the inconvenient parts that suggest their problems run deeper than a single bad decision or difficult circumstance. They present a version of themselves carefully curated to generate maximum understanding while obscuring the complex, messy reality that would require more uncomfortable conversations about patterns, pathology, and persistent risk factors.
Both the offender sitting across from me in a reentry session and the filmmaker crafting a narrative for mass consumption share the same fundamental goal: control what the audience sees, emphasize what generates sympathy and omit what complicates it. Both succeed when we forget to ask what’s being left out. Both rely on the reality that audiences — whether correctional staff, parole boards, or moviegoers — are more likely to believe a clean, coherent narrative than to dig for the messy complications beneath.
This is why the film’s treatment of Manchester represents devising camouflage for immorality rather than honest storytelling. It’s not just that they removed material context about victims and their lasting trauma. They sanitized the offender himself, creating a version of Manchester carefully edited to maximize audience connection while minimizing the complex, ongoing issues that corrections professionals must actually assess and manage. They did what Manchester himself would do if given the opportunity to tell his own story: they made him sympathetic by making him incomplete. It compresses Manchester’s years of crime and decades of incarceration into 126 minutes of entertainment with dramatic music, attractive cinematography and emotional resonance carefully constructed to guide audience sympathies. Then the credits roll, the lights come up, and everyone goes home. The material consequences — the ones that persist for actual victims and offenders — never appear.
Correctional professionals cannot operate devoid of material context. This is what distinguishes our work from entertainment: we deal with the reality Hollywood systematically edits out. Not the attractive actor with perfect lighting but the actual offender in institutional clothing. Not the carefully curated two-hour narrative arc with satisfying resolution but the 8,395 days (and counting) of Manchester’s actual incarceration, each one largely identical to the last. Not the dramatic confrontation and growth moment but the ongoing daily management of antisocial behavior, the slow work of accountability development, the assessment of whether genuine change has occurred or whether remorse is performed for parole consideration.
Material context is what corrections does. Cinema is what you get when you systematically remove it. This removal isn’t neutral — it’s what makes the moral camouflage possible in the first place.
The tangible impact on corrections work
For those working in reentry and rehabilitation, films like “Roofman” create concrete, measurable obstacles to the work of developing genuine accountability and preparing offenders for successful community reintegration.
Even in facilities with limited media access, word about movies like “Roofman” travels quickly — through family calls, letters and news segments. An inmate doesn’t need to see the film to absorb its message: that charm excuses harm.
When an inmate can point to Roofman’s 83% Rotten Tomatoes score, B+ CinemaScore, and awards buzz as evidence that “people understand why we do what we do,” the careful work of challenging rationalizations becomes exponentially more difficult. We’re no longer just addressing individual cognitive distortions developed through personal history and antisocial thinking patterns. We’re fighting culturally validated templates for avoiding responsibility, backed by the full weight of Hollywood production values, A-list casting, and critical approval.
The conversations become: “If my crimes were wrong, why did they make a movie celebrating someone who did the same things?” “Why is Channing Tatum playing someone like me if what I did was so terrible?” “The film showed he had his reasons — I had mine too.” “Everyone understands that corporate victims aren’t the same as real victims — even Hollywood gets that.”
These aren’t hypothetical conversations. These are actual dynamics that emerge when celebrity criminal narratives permeate popular culture. Inmates don’t need more cultural permission to avoid accountability — they need to confront the material harm they caused. But facilitating that reckoning becomes nearly impossible when the world outside institutional walls is giving standing ovations to films that celebrate identical behavior patterns.
Family members weaponize these narratives as well. “He’s just like that guy in ‘Roofman’ — he made mistakes but he’s not a bad person.” “Hollywood made a whole movie about someone who did the same thing — obviously it’s more complicated than you’re making it.” “He had his reasons, just like in the movie.” The cultural validation provides ammunition for families already inclined to minimize their loved one’s culpability, making the difficult work of helping both offenders and their families develop realistic, accountability-based perspectives for reentry even harder.
Beyond individual cases, there are broader implications for institutional safety and staff effectiveness. When charm becomes celebrated rather than recognized as a potential manipulation tactic, when articulateness is confused with genuine insight rather than understood as possibly sophisticated rationalization, when likability is treated as evidence of rehabilitation rather than as one trait among many requiring careful assessment, the risk to staff and institutional security increases. Officers must maintain professional skepticism and objective assessment capabilities even as the culture increasingly teaches that such skepticism represents closed-mindedness rather than professional competence.
What’s really at stake: The moral compass and its consequences
The systematic dumbing down of society’s moral compass isn’t an abstract philosophical concern — it has concrete consequences for victim services, criminal justice effectiveness, public safety and social cohesion.
When victims watch their trauma become someone else’s redemption arc, when they see the person who terrorized them portrayed by an attractive actor with sympathetic framing, when their lasting harm is erased in favor of the offender’s emotional journey, they receive a clear cultural message: your suffering matters less than his story. This compounds trauma, undermines the healing process and teaches victims that seeking justice through official channels may result in their victimizer achieving celebrity status rather than appropriate accountability.
When juries are influenced by “criminal genius” narratives that make certain crimes seem impressive rather than harmful, when parole boards face public pressure to release celebrated offenders based on their media portrayal rather than actual assessment of rehabilitation and risk, when sentences seem harsh because the criminal is charismatic and well-cast, the justice system’s ability to function consistently and fairly is compromised. Equal treatment under law becomes impossible when some offenders benefit from cultural celebration while others face full accountability.
When young people see criminal cleverness as aspirational, when fraud seems victimless if targets are corporate, when charm is mistaken for reformation and manipulation for emotional intelligence, when accountability becomes optional for the sufficiently entertaining, we’re raising a generation with fundamentally compromised moral reasoning. The compass doesn’t just point in the wrong direction — it spins uselessly, unable to distinguish ethical north from magnetic entertainment.
Reality versus narrative fantasy
Jeffrey Manchester remains incarcerated at Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is currently in year 24 of a 45-year sentence, with a projected release date of December 4, 2036. By the time he walks free — if he serves his full sentence — he will have spent 8,395 days (minimum) in custody for his crimes.
This is the material context “Roofman” glosses over in favor of Channing Tatum’s emotional journey — nearly a quarter century of actual consequence compressed into 126 minutes of entertainment, then forgotten when the credits roll. Meanwhile, his 40-plus victims continue living with the aftermath of his crimes in material reality that doesn’t conform to narrative arcs.
We celebrate criminals like rock stars because Hollywood has perfected the art of removing everything that would prevent celebration: the material consequences that persist for decades, the lasting victim trauma that doesn’t heal on screenplay timelines, the mundane reality of incarceration stretching into years and decades, and the systematic harm radiating outward through families and communities. What remains is narrative without accountability, charm without context, entertainment without ethics, celebrity without consequence.
For correctional professionals — managing the Jeffrey Manchesters of the world daily, facilitating the difficult work of genuine accountability development, conducting the careful assessments that protect public safety, supporting the slow process of rehabilitation that has no dramatic moments or satisfying narrative arcs — these films aren’t harmless entertainment. They’re cultural validation for the exact thinking patterns that endanger institutions, undermine rehabilitation efforts, ensure recidivism, and make reentry success exponentially more difficult.
The fact that “Roofman” made it to theaters at all — let alone to positive reviews, strong audience scores and awards consideration — demonstrates how far society’s moral compass has been systematically dumbed down. We’ve learned to mistake charisma for character, entertainment value for moral permission, comfortable ambiguity for sophisticated thought and the systematic removal of material context for artistic license.
Correctional professionals deal with the reality Hollywood edits out: the material context of crime, consequence and accountability that cinema finds inconvenient to narrative satisfaction. We sit across from the actual offenders, not the attractive actors. We manage the actual decades of incarceration, not the dramatic two-hour compression. We facilitate the actual work of accountability development, not the scripted moment of realization that signals transformation.
We cannot afford a dumbed-down moral compass. We cannot afford to withhold judgment. We cannot afford to celebrate criminals as rock stars simply because their stories entertain.
Perhaps it’s time the rest of society couldn’t afford it either.
The material reality is waiting, whether cameras capture it or not. The victims remain, whether Hollywood acknowledges them or not. The consequences persist, whether audiences want to confront them or not. And somewhere in Central Prison, Jeffrey Manchester continues serving his sentence — day 8,395 and counting.
That’s the story that deserves telling. But it would never sell tickets.
Tactical takeaway
When culture turns offenders into sympathetic protagonists, it’s up to those of us inside the system to remind society that accountability isn’t cruelty. It’s the only path to real justice — for offenders, victims, and communities alike.
When you see criminals turned into heroes on screen, what goes through your mind? Share below.
About the author
Russ Hamilton is a retired sergeant for the California Department of Corrections.