The current bipartisan consensus on the need to pursue criminal justice reform has been heralded—again, and again, and again—as the long-awaited agreement that ends mass incarceration and its many ills: the incredible size and the exorbitant cost of the police and prison system; the qualities of discrimination and poverty that lead to arrests; and the preeminence of incarceration as social policy. Republicans and Democrats are finally uniting conservative and liberal values to cure a diseased system, a rot in the nation at large.

That’s the news, at least. The consensus may be bipartisan, but it’s not ideologically balanced. The language advocates use to describe the problems at hand and the nature of their proposed policy solutions demonstrate that this moment is far more concerned with mass than incarceration. Despite reports of meeting in the middle, we’re witnessing a liberal acquiescence: Nearly everything is phrased in conservative terms—cutting costs, saving funds, and minimizing the size of the system.

Consider the eerily compatible messaging of the leading conservative, liberal, and centrist advocacy groups. Right on Crime—the conservative organization credited with kick starting and leading the current reform movement and efforts in many states—centers their drive for reform in fiscal responsibility. The organization’s short statement of principles is replete with concern for “cost”, “taxpayers” and “spending” (but not “fairness,” “equality,” or “rights”).

Meanwhile, the ACLU’s new Campaign to End Mass Incarceration (Smart Justice, Fair Justice) starts by putting “needlessly throwing away too many lives” on par with “wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars.” The Campaign’s listed priorities all deal with the size of the justice system and cost cutting in some form. Even the call to “Invest in Better Systems” emphasizes that “services like drug treatment and affordable housing cost less and can have a better record of success” than the criminal justice system. Likewise, the Coalition for Public Safety, a new bipartisan umbrella campaign sponsored by the likes of Koch Industries and the MacArthur Foundation and led by groups from the Center for American Progress to Americans for Tax Reform, emphasizes their “comprehensive” approach but also tends to be minimalist in practice. Presenting the Coalition’s case on PBS recently, Mark Holden (senior vice president of Koch Industries) and Neera Tanden (president of the Center for American Progress) laid out the vision. “What we’re talking about are [sic] more non-violent offenders, first-time offenders, low-level offenders not getting really long sentences.” Tanden expressed concern with how the “criminal justice system is actually increasing poverty.” That poverty itself also contributes to a cycle of poverty, crime, and incarceration—or that only focusing on specific offenders will hardly address the size of the problem—remained unsaid.

It’s not an acquiescence that’s caused by organizational bargaining, either. Consider the remarkable primary document published last week by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and public policy institute, which reveals just how far this frame of thinking persists in our nation’s main political and policy leaders. The volume of essays, titled “Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice,” has opinions from both sides of the aisle on how to fix criminal justice; it includes writing from a former president, our current vice-president, and almost a dozen more politicians with presidential candidacy either in their past or their future. As an incredible compendium of voices, and proof of criminal justice reform’s sudden bipartisan relevance, it merited coverage on the front page of The New York Times.