American criminal law is a story of burning down villages to save them. We sometimes talk about victimless crimes, but the reality even is more perverse: we enact criminal laws that make victims out of the very people they are enacted to save.

I recently read Radley Balko’s 2014 book Rise of the Warrior Cop, a chronicle of police militarization and abuses. Much of Balko’s story concerns the War on Drugs. Reality, and sometimes politicians (especially in the case of marijuana), convinced Americans that drug addiction endangers their neighbors, relatives, and friends. Of course some of these concerns center on the possibility of addicts robbing people, burgling houses, and getting behind the wheel while high. But many of them reflect worry about the lives of those who would be enthralled to addiction.

How did Americans respond to these fears? Brutal enforcement and punishment. The public cheered for decades as police smashed through doors in search of bedroom drug stashes. Elected officials demanded that law enforcement agents acquire grenade launchers, helicopters, and tanks for use on suburban streets. Judges authorized officers to grab addicts from sidewalks, throw them onto squad car hoods, and haul them off to jail. Politicians fantasized about creating “boot camps” to detain thousands upon thousands of drug users, including children. And now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, has proposed creating “wellness farms” for addicts as well as users of legal, prescribed psychiatric medications.

These measures were never limited to large-scale meth labs and marijuana farms. Most SWAT deployments—often involving officers invading homes without warrants, or without first knocking at the door, identifying themselves, and giving residents the chance to open up peacefully—were carried out to serve drug warrants.

Along the way, Americans surrendered centuries of hard-won protections for the privacy and security of their homes against government intrusions. Balko details how police forces came to resemble the standing armies that inspired much of the American Revolution, when the British used them to occupy colonial cities. Drug War tactics have included constant video recording of a backyard for nearly a year, rifling through trash bags left out for collection, and even hovering aircraft four hundred feet above people’s property.

All this—in the name of saving and bettering the lives of those very American drug users spied upon, frisked, beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes even killed?

Punishment for the sake of the punished is not limited to the narcotics context. The War on Drugs is the reincarnation of Prohibition, when professions of compassion for the poor drunk resulted in the Supreme Court stripping his car, telephone lines, and “open fields” of Fourth Amendment protection. In modern times, as Balko notes, SWAT teams raid private homes over $50 buy-in poker games in order to save gamblers from their own vice. Americans still ship prostitutes off to jails and prisons in order to deliver them from the perceived miseries of their free lives—facilities, by the way, that are hardly free of sexual assault. And, around the time Balko’s book came out a decade ago, an NYPD officer choked the life out of Eric Garner for selling “loosie” cigarettes. Enforcing punitive taxes meant to protect smokers from the perils of tobacco was the basis for taking a man’s life.

There is such a thing as tough love, and rehabilitation is supposed to be a part of criminal punishment. But criminal punishment is not justified simply by someone’s need for rehabilitation—it should follow an offender’s wrongdoing against other people.

It is possible that professions of concern for those we arrest are a mere pretext, and that hatred, fear, and loathing actually drive many criminal laws. There is certainly historical evidence for this. And yet, there are such things as people who do support hurting others out of a genuine desire to help them.

Part of the reason is a failure of American public imagination. We are impoverished for thinking either something is morally indifferent or it ought to be punished through criminal law. Addiction to drugs or alcohol deprives users of their full human potential and deprives families of a responsible relative. Immoderate gambling can bankrupt families and cost people their futures. Prostitution often leaves those engaging in it feeling degraded and bereft of genuine human relationships.

These are forms of suffering and indifference to them is wrong. But Americans tend to answer their own cry for something to be done with the willingness to do anything. Police, jails, prisons: these are obvious and existing responses to problems, while care, healing, genuine rehabilitation are hard. Government laws and funding can arm SWAT teams and build cell blocks, but loving people back to life takes society’s time, patience, humanity, and ingenuity.

Responding to outrageous situations with outrage, though, has cost America much life, liberty, and decency. The answer is to stop believing that people in need of rehabilitation need criminal punishment. Police, jails, and prisons should aim to rehabilitate criminal offenders who violate others’ rights, but people should not be arrested, jailed, or imprisoned just because they need to get better. Rolling back criminal laws targeting vices such as drugs, gambling, and prostitution would be a sign of mercy toward those who need it—and a recognition that cruelty is not compassion.