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Breyer, J., dissenting
offender's prison term ends, threatening his release from the confinement that imprisonment assures. But it is difficult to see why rational legislators who seek treatment would write the Act in this way—providing treatment years after the criminal act that indicated its necessity. See, e. g., Wettstein, A Psychiatric Perspective on Washington's Sexually Violent Predators Statute, 15 U. Puget Sound L. Rev. 597, 617 (1992) (stating that treatment delay leads to "loss of memory" and makes it "more difficult for the offender" to "accept responsibility," and that time in prison leads to attitude hardening that "engender[s] a distorted view of the precipitating offense"). And it is particularly difficult to see why legislators who specifically wrote into the statute a finding that "prognosis for rehabilitating . . . in a prison setting is poor" would leave an offender in that setting for months or years before beginning treatment. This is to say, the timing provisions of the statute confirm the Kansas Supreme Court's view that treatment was not a particularly important legislative objective.
I recognize one possible counterargument. A State, wanting both to punish Hendricks (say, for deterrence purposes) and also to treat him, might argue that it should be permitted to postpone treatment until after punishment in order to make certain that the punishment in fact occurs. But any such reasoning is out of place here. Much of the treatment that Kansas offered here (called "ward milieu" and "group therapy") can be given at the same time as, and in the same place where, Hendricks serves his punishment. See, e. g., Testimony of Leroy Hendricks, App. 142-143, 150, 154, 179-181 (stating that Washington and Kansas had both provided group therapy to Hendricks, and that he had both taken and refused such treatment at various points); Testimony of Terry Davis, SRS Director of Quality Assurance, id., at 78-81 (pointing out that treatment under the Act takes place in surroundings very similar to those in which prisoners receive treatment); Testimony of John House, SRS
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