Cite as: 536 U. S. 24 (2002)
Opinion of Kennedy, J.
respondent here is asked to discuss other past crimes as part of a legitimate rehabilitative program conducted within prison walls.
To reject out of hand these considerations would be to ignore the State's interests in offering rehabilitation programs and providing for the efficient administration of its prisons. There is no indication that the SATP is an elaborate attempt to avoid the protections offered by the privilege against compelled self-incrimination. Rather, the program serves an important social purpose. It would be bitter medicine to treat as irrelevant the State's legitimate interests and to invalidate the SATP on the ground that it incidentally burdens an inmate's right to remain silent.
Determining what constitutes unconstitutional compulsion involves a question of judgment: Courts must decide whether the consequences of an inmate's choice to remain silent are closer to the physical torture against which the Constitution clearly protects or the de minimis harms against which it does not. The Sandin framework provides a reasonable means of assessing whether the response of prison administrators to correctional and rehabilitative necessities are so out of the ordinary that one could sensibly say they rise to the level of unconstitutional compulsion.
Prison context or not, respondent's choice is marked less by compulsion than by choices the Court has held give no rise to a self-incrimination claim. The "criminal process, like the rest of the legal system, is replete with situations requiring the making of difficult judgments as to which course to follow. Although a defendant may have a right, even of constitutional dimensions, to follow whichever course he chooses, the Constitution does not by that token always forbid requiring him to choose." McGautha v. California, 402 U. S. 183, 213 (1971) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). It is well settled that the government need not make the exercise of the Fifth Amendment privilege cost free. See, e. g., Jenkins v. Anderson, 447 U. S. 231, 238
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