Cite as: 536 U. S. 24 (2002)
Opinion of Kennedy, J.
determined that their hard choice between silence and the consequences was not compelled. It is beyond doubt, of course, that respondent would prefer not to choose between losing prison privileges and accepting responsibility for his past crimes. It is a choice, nonetheless, that does not amount to compulsion, and therefore one Kansas may require respondent to make.
The Federal Government has filed an amicus brief describing its sex offender treatment program. Were respondent's position to prevail, the constitutionality of the federal program would be cast into serious doubt. The fact that the offender in the federal program can choose to participate without being given a new prisoner classification is not determinative. For, as the Government explains, its program is conducted at a single, 112-bed facility that is more desirable than other federal prisons. Tr. of Oral Arg. 22. Inmates choose at the outset whether to enter the federal program. Once accepted, however, inmates must continue to discuss and accept responsibility for their crimes if they wish to maintain the status quo and remain in their more comfortable accommodations. Otherwise they will be expelled from the program and sent to a less desirable facility. Id., at 27. Thus the federal program is different from Kansas' SATP only in that it does not require inmates to sacrifice privileges besides housing as a consequence of nonparticipation. The federal program is comparable to the Kansas program because it does not offer participants use immunity and because it conditions a desirable housing assignment on inmates' willingness to accept responsibility for past behavior. Respondent's theory cannot be confined in any meaningful way, and state and federal courts applying that view would have no principled means to determine whether these similarities are sufficient to render the federal program unconstitutional.
Respondent is mistaken as well to concentrate on the so-called reward/penalty distinction and the illusory baseline
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