If those words meant something different, such as people will be caught and expected to redress their crimes or prisons will attempt to reform behaviour and provide the tools to steer away from a life of crime after release, then being tough on crime would have fewer detractors.
And in many respects those detractors are right. The resources being invested into the current tough on crime measures would be better invested into addressing the causes of crime. It won't solve all of the problems since there are some genuinely nasty people out there, but there is a good chance that it would do a much better job.
But instead, it spends even more money punishing those who commit crimes. This has zero effect on reducing crimes, but makes people feel good about punishing the bad guys, because again: it's morally superior in American culture to punish 'The Bad People', and it's difficult to be elected on a platform that can be seen as helping 'The Bad People'.
The cost of putting 100 at-risk kids into after-school programs to help steer them away from crime isn't small. But if it keeps 1 person out of prison, it pays for itself many times over. And Americans, generally, don't want to fund this sort of thing.
To give but one example of the difference in mindset: Portugal has had great success by decriminalizing drugs and treating addiction as a mental health issue, whereas America prefers to throw people in a cage and ruin their lives because "drugs are bad". That's part of what America means by being "tough" on crime: lack empathy, don't look at individual circumstances, and treat mental health issues as crimes to keep feeding a for-profit prison industry and ever-increasing police power.
Edit: I wonder if the downvotes are partisan over my mention of Biden’s role in our current state of affairs. Just trying to help explain America’s peculiar pathology that led us to the shameful statistic of having the highest incarceration rate in the world.