Laws should certainly be enforced, but the corollary of that is that one should only have laws that one is willing to fully enforce, and of which the full enforcement will create greater good. When we lawfare masses of people into long-term and repeated incarceration (and many features of our current system do this, to the profit only of the prison-industrial corporations and to the great loss of our society as a whole), we gain nothing, not even safety, and we lose a lot.
In 2023, we spent more than $60,000,000,000 on incarcerating people in the US. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-do-states-spend-on-prisons/
We have between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 American adults in prison, with all the loss of productivity and tax base that implies (above and beyond the actual cost of imprisonment).
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html
Even assuming that each one of them were making less than half of the $45,000 median US income per year, and taking the lower estimate of 1,500,000 as our base, that is a loss to our tax base of 30,000,000,000 ($20k x 1.5 million).
Aren't you outraged that they aren't contributing, that our country is being dragged down by the unnecessary expense and lost profit?
Aren't you concerned about the destruction of American families and values through the many, many fathers and mothers who are imprisoned?
For anyone calling themselves a true conservative in a fiscal and family-values sense, and not a far-right zealot, changing the way we police and imprison our citizens ought to be a keystone political issue.