76
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
Congress in fact prescribed a similar method of calculation in a parallel provision of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, 18 U. S. C. § 3583(g), which was added at the same time as § 3565(a) and which also sets out the punishment for defendants found in possession of a controlled substance. Section 3583(g) explicitly provides: "If the defendant is found by the court to be in the possession of a controlled substance, the court shall terminate the term of supervised release and require the defendant to serve in prison not less than one-third of the term of supervised release." Considering that §§ 3565(a) and 3583(g) were enacted at the same time and are directed at precisely the same problem, it seems quite reasonable to construe them in pari materia to call for parallel treatment of drug offenders under noncustodial supervision. Whatever the differences between supervised release and probation, surely supervised release is more like probation than it is like imprisonment. That Congress explicitly chose in § 3583(g) to tie the length of imprisonment to the length of supervised release suggests quite strongly that Congress meant in § 3565(a) to use length of the original sentence of probation as the basis for calculation. At the very least, the method of calculation prescribed in § 3583(g) removes the imaginary "shoal" which blocks the Court's way to a sensible construction of § 3565(a).
The Court refuses to read these provisions in pari mate-ria because a sentence of probation is normally—but not necessarily—longer than a period of supervised release. See ante, at 50-51, and n. 8. Simply because the end result of the calculation might be different in some cases, however, is not a persuasive reason for refusing to recognize the obvious similarity in the methods of calculation. Nor is it irrational for Congress to have decided that, in general, those defendants who have already been incarcerated should return to prison for a shorter time than those who have served no time in prison.
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