62
Stevens, J., dissenting
disregard for both factors that represents an unjustified departure. Unlike Woodard, Murphy, and Baxter, respondent cannot invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and then gamble on whether the Department will revoke his Level III status; the punishment is mandatory. The fact that this case involves a prison inmate, as did Woodard and Baxter, is not enough to render those decisions controlling authority. Since we have already said inmates do not forfeit their Fifth Amendment rights at the jailhouse gate, Murphy, 465 U. S., at 426, the plurality must point to something beyond respondent's status as a prisoner to justify its departure from our precedent.
II
The plurality and Justice O'Connor hold that the consequences stemming from respondent's invocation of the privilege are not serious enough to constitute compulsion. The threat of transfer to Level I and a maximum-security unit is not sufficiently coercive in their view—either because the consequence is not really a penalty, just the loss of a benefit, or because it is a penalty, but an insignificant one. I strongly disagree.
It took respondent several years to acquire the status that he occupied in 1994 when he was ordered to participate in the SATP. Because of the nature of his convictions, in 1983 the Department initially placed him in a maximum-security classification. Not until 1989 did the Department change his "security classification to 'medium by exception' because of his good behavior." Lile v. Simmons, 23 Kan. App. 2d 1, 2, 929 P. 2d 171, 172 (1996). Thus, the sanction at issue threatens to deprive respondent of a status in the prison community that it took him six years to earn and which he had successfully maintained for five more years when he was ordered to incriminate himself. Moreover, abruptly "busting" his custody back to Level I, App. 94, would impose the same stigma on him as would a disciplinary conviction for any of the most serious offenses described in petitioners' formal
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