Cite as: 531 U. S. 230 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
that the statute "establishes only the alien's eligibility for the waiver. Such eligibility in no way limits the considerations that may guide the Attorney General in exercising her discretion to determine who, among those eligible, will be accorded grace." Id., at 31. Similarly in this case, the statute's restriction of early release eligibility to nonviolent offenders does not cut short the considerations that may guide the Bureau. Just as the Attorney General permissibly considered aspects of entry fraud, even though entry fraud was a criterion of statutory eligibility, so the Bureau may consider aspects of the conduct of conviction, even though the conviction is a criterion of statutory eligibility.4
We also reject Lopez's argument, echoed in part by the dissent, post, at 248-249, that the agency must not make categorical exclusions, but may rely only on case-by-case assessments.5 "[E]ven if a statutory scheme requires individual-4 Lopez contends that the Bureau's creation of additional hurdles to receipt of a sentence reduction defeats Congress' purpose of giving inmates an incentive to undergo drug treatment. Brief for Petitioner 24-29. In INS v. Yueh-Shaio Yang, 519 U. S. 26 (1996), we said that "[i]t could be argued that if the Attorney General determined that any entry fraud or misrepresentation, no matter how minor and no matter what the attendant circumstances, would cause her to withhold waiver, she would not be exercising the conferred discretion at all, but would be making a nullity of the statute." Id., at 31. In this case, it is plain that the Bureau has not rendered § 3621(e)'s incentive a nullity. A total of 6,559 inmates have received sentence reductions under § 3621(e)(2)(B), including 2,633 inmates in Fiscal Year 1999 alone. Bureau of Prisons, Substance Abuse Treatment Programs in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Report to Congress 8 (Jan. 2000). Moreover, inmates who do not qualify for early release, like inmates who do, receive other incentives to participate in substance abuse treatment. See 28 CFR §§ 550.57(a)(1), (3) (2000) ("An inmate may receive incentives for his or her satisfactory involvement in the residential [drug treatment] program," including "[l]imited financial awards" and "[l]ocal institution incentives such as preferred living quarters or special recognition privileges.").
5 The dissent appears to acknowledge that the Bureau may give "neardispositive weight to preconviction criteria." Post, at 249. To the extent the dissent would permit the BOP to accord heavy weight to preconviction
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