772
Breyer, J., dissenting
One further background circumstance helps to explain why the Commission's reading of the statute is not arbitrary, i. e., why it is not unreasonable for the Guideline to treat recidivist enhancements differently from enhancements based on conduct. The career offender subsection was enacted in the context of a sweeping overhaul of the federal system of criminal sentencing brought about by the Sentencing Act. One objective of the Act was honesty in sentencing, the idea that an offender actually should serve approximately the time stated in the sentence that the judge imposed. S. Rep. No. 98-225, at 56. Congress achieved this objective by abolishing parole. It thereby transformed the sentence the judge pronounced from an enormous overstatement (given the fact that the offender would have spent perhaps one-third to one-half or even more of that time on parole), into real-time years almost all of which the offender would actually spend in prison. In other words, given parole, a 30-year sentence might mean 10 to 20 years; a 15-year sentence might mean 5. See generally id., at 46-49; Supplementary Report, App. C.
When it abolished parole, however, Congress did not expect the Commission to write Guidelines that automatically transformed into "real time" the parole-inflated 20- or 30-year terms that judges had previously imposed upon, say, bank robbers or drug offenders. Rather Congress expected the Commission to adjust the length of the sentence the judge pronounced downward to reflect the fact that henceforth there would be no parole and the offender would really serve close to the entire term. See 28 U. S. C. § 994(m). That is what the Commission did. Supplementary Report 21.
This contextual circumstance helps to explain why Congress might indeed have expected that the Commission would read the career offender subsection to refer to statutory offenses plus conduct-based enhancements alone (without recidivism-based sentence enhancements). Congress realized that the pre-Guideline sentencing system would have
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