Johnson v. United States, 529 U.S. 694, 31 (2000)

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724

JOHNSON v. UNITED STATES

Scalia, J., dissenting

tions of its drafters." BFP v. Resolution Trust Corporation, 511 U. S. 531, 563 (1994) (Souter, J., dissenting) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). It would have been entirely reasonable for Congress to conclude that a prisoner who had broken the terms of supervised release seriously enough to be reincarcerated should not be trusted in that status again; and that a judge should not be tempted to impose an inappropriately short period of reimprisonment by the availability of further supervised release. Congress might also have wished to eliminate the unattractive prospect that a prisoner would go through one or even more repetitions of the violation-reimprisonment-supervised-release sequence—which is avoided by requiring the district court confronted with a violation either to leave the prisoner on supervised release (perhaps with tightened conditions and lengthened term, as § 3583(e)(2) permits) or to impose imprisonment, but not to combine the two. Because the interpretation demanded by the text is an entirely plausible one, this Court's views of what is prudent policy are beside the point. And that is so whether those policy views are forth-rightly stated as such ("[I]f any prisoner might profit from the decompression stage of supervised release, no prisoner needs it more than one who has already tried liberty and failed," ante, at 709), or whether, to give an interpretive odor to the opinion, they are recast as policies that it "seems very unlikely" for Congress to have intended ("Congress . . . seems very unlikely to have meant to compel the courts to wash their hands of the worst cases at the end of reimprisonment," ante, at 709-710).

Finally, the Court appeals to pre-Guidelines practice with regard to nondetentive monitoring. But this cannot cure the lack of statutory authorization for additional supervised release. Even if the language of § 3583(e)(3) were ambiguous (which it is not), that history would be of little relevance, since the Sentencing Reform Act's adoption of supervised release was meant to make a significant break with prior

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