46
Opinion of the Court
shall revoke the sentence of probation and sentence the defendant to not less than one-third of the original sentence." This language appears to differentiate, not to equate or amalgamate, "the sentence of probation" and "the original sentence." See United States v. Penn, 17 F. 3d 70, 73 (CA4 1994) ("a sentence of probation does not equate to a sentence of incarceration"). If Congress wished to convey the meaning pressed by the Government, it could easily have instructed that the defendant be incarcerated for a term "not less than one-third of the original sentence of probation," or "not less than one-third of the revoked term of probation."
The Government's interpretation has a further textual difficulty. The Government reads the word "sentence," when used as a verb in the proviso's phrase "sentence the defendant," to mean "sentence to imprisonment" rather than "sentence to probation." Yet, when the word "sentence" next appears, this time as a noun ("original sentence"), the Government reads the word to mean "sentence of probation." Again, had Congress designed the language to capture the Government's construction, the proviso might have read: "[T]he court shall revoke the sentence of probation and sentence the defendant to a term of imprisonment whose length is not less than one-third the length of the original sentence of probation." Cf. Reves v. Ernst & Young, 507 U. S. 170, 177 (1993) ("it seems reasonable to give . . . a similar construction" to a word used as both a noun and a verb in a single statutory sentence).
As the Court of Appeals commented, "[p]robation and imprisonment are not fungible"; they are sentences fundamentally different in character. 969 F. 2d, at 984. One-third of a 60-month term of probation or "conditional liberty" is a sentence scarcely resembling a 20-month sentence of imprisonment. The Government insists and, as already noted, we agree, that the revocation sentence, measured as one-third of the "original sentence," must be a sentence of imprisonment. But that "must be" suggests that "original sentence" refers
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