Earlier this week, a forum was held in Las Vegas discussing ideas about reforming our criminal justice system. In some ways, I’m sympathetic to some of the goals of these folks. But the most interesting (and troubling) thing to me about the forum was what they didn’t seem to talk about at all — that is, the reasons we have a criminal justice system in the first place.

The panel was focused on ending “mass incarceration.” But discussing raw numbers of people in jail alone without talking about it as a function of public safety is to ignore – and indeed undermine – the overarching interests of justice.

“Reform” suggests that we are trying to improve an existing system and make it better equipped to meet its goals. But it is amazing how easy it is to forget to ask the most basic question:  “What is our goal?” — especially when a difficult choice to be made and many factors are involved. Criminal justice reformers – of both the “tougher on crime” and “empty the jails” flavors – seem especially susceptible to this peculiar blind spot.

As every first year law student is taught, there are five goals of our criminal justice system: retribution (punishment), deterrence, incapacitation (taking away the ability to commit new crimes), rehabilitation and restoration (restitution to victims). All of them are important to weigh and consider in any reform argument, or before the interests of justice can truly be said to be served by any such efforts. It is especially easy to lose sight of the other people affected by a defendant’s crimes, when the focus of virtually every court hearing is on the criminal defendant him- or herself who appears in person before a judge, and not the members of the community impacted by various crimes.

As important as understanding what our goals are is understanding what they are not. We could achieve 100 percent “success” in ending mass incarceration by banning jails and prisons completely, just as we could statistically claim a 0 percent crime rate if we chose never to arrest anyone in the first place. But neither method of “improving” those statistics meets any of the objectives of our criminal justice system.

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Our national incarceration rate is undeniably high, and I’d be as happy to see that number go down as anyone – but not at the expense of justice for everyone involved. At the same time those prison rates were rising, crime rates were falling dramatically, and that isn’t a coincidence.

Tougher sentences alone aren’t the only reason we live in vastly safer communities today than we did 25 years ago. In that same time period, more holistic approaches to rehabilitating and supervising offenders have proliferated nation-wide, most notably in the form of Drug Courts, Mental Health Courts and other similar programs.

If you invented a pill that cured addiction, you would empty out our jails and prisons overnight, while protecting the public against violent crimes and all manner of theft. Addiction and mental illness (and often both) are at the heart of the vast majority of our criminal cases. Since we don’t have such a pill, drug courts and their various cousins seek to address both the clinical and behavioral problems people are having that land them – and keep them – in jail in the first place. Any talk of criminal justice or “mass incarceration” reform that doesn’t focus on addiction and mental health treatment – and Monday’s conference appears to have been a prime example – simply cannot and should not be taken seriously.

(And no, legalizing drugs doesn’t make the problem go away. Marijuana is legal now, and we still have people robbing and killing each other over it. And don’t get me started on the often legally available opiates…)

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A great deal of the discussion also had to do with changing the way we handle pre-conviction detention. We are all, of course, innocent until proven guilty, and yet a significant portion of our jail populations are people who have not yet been convicted. Most criminal defendants are indigent, and can stay in jail for months even on relatively low bails.

Bail reform efforts are already underway in Nevada, and for the most part they’re good ideas. Setting bail based on an individual’s criminal history, previous failures to appear in court, and other risk factors is better than basing one’s freedom almost solely on his income. But it’s also worth noting that in my experience, it is vanishingly rare for anyone with minimal criminal history to remain in custody for minor offenses solely because they couldn’t afford bail – in such cases, a release on their own recognizance is the norm. And the idea floated at that conference that traffic tickets somehow turn into felonies is simply absurd. There is usually far more to a sob story about a person languishing behind bars than first meets the eye.

Most people who remain in jail are there because their addictions are driving anti-social or violent behavior. I have often seen incarceration – especially before treatment options can be arranged – be literally life saving for addicts – particularly for the courts’ more regular “customers.” Among the reasons drug courts and other alternatives to incarceration work is because participants are supervised, constantly drug tested and assigned predictable consequences (including jail time) if they continue to use or otherwise fail to comply with the requirements of those programs. Serious bail reformers (as opposed to political panderers) can be recognized by their advocacy of similar conditions as alternatives to bail, where the facts of the cases warrant them.

Again, discussing custody status (either while a case is pending or in terms of an actual sentence) without addressing addiction or considering the community’s safety before that addiction is treated is at best pointless. At worst, such ideas wind up doing the greatest harm to the people criminal justice reform advocates claim to be championing.

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Our criminal justice system must live up to the “justice” in its name. The justice sought must truly be for all, including the victims of past crimes and the people who won’t be victims because an offender is incapacitated or deterred from committing more crimes. For offenders, justice includes punishment – but also real opportunities to better themselves, and to break the behavioral cycles which led them to be handcuffed in the first place. The balance can never be perfectly found, and while the pursuit of justice will ever be hard and imperfect, there is always room for improvement. But any proposed changes to our system that focus on one aspect of justice to the exclusion of any other can never be honestly called “reform.”

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City, but before that he was a public defender for five years in Washoe County. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].