Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 799

529US3

Unit: $U56

[09-28-01 09:22:19] PAGES PGT: OPIN

724

JOHNSON v. UNITED STATES

Scalia, J., dissenting

tions of its drafters.” BFP v. Resolution Trust Corpora-
tion, 511 U. S. 531, 563 (1994) (Souter, J., dissenting) (cita-
tions and internal quotation marks omitted).
It would have
been entirely reasonable for Congress to conclude that a pris-
oner who had broken the terms of supervised release seri-
ously 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 pros-
pect that a prisoner would go through one or even more rep-
etitions 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 im-
prisonment, but not to combine the two. Because the inter-
pretation 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 reimprison-
ment,” 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 ambigu-
ous (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