Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 784.0

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Unit: $U56

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Cite as: 529 U. S. 694 (2000)

709

Opinion of the Court

from the prison to liberty. See, e. g., United States v. John-
son, ante, at 59 (“Congress intended supervised release to
assist individuals in their transition to community life. Su-
pervised release fulﬁlls rehabilitative ends, distinct from
those served by incarceration”). The Senate Report was
quite explicit about this, stating that the goal of supervised
release is “to ease the defendant’s transition into the commu-
nity after the service of a long prison term for a particularly
serious offense, or to provide rehabilitation to a defendant
who has spent a fairly short period in prison for punish-
ment or other purposes but still needs supervision and
training programs after release.” S. Rep. No. 98–225, p. 124
(1983).

Prisoners may, of course, vary in the degree of help needed
for successful reintegration. Supervised release departed
from the parole system it replaced by giving district courts
the freedom to provide postrelease supervision for those, and
only those, who needed it. See id., at 125 (“In effect, the
term of supervised release provided by the bill takes the
place of parole supervision under current law. Unlike cur-
rent law, however, probation ofﬁcers will only be supervising
those releasees from prison who actually need supervision,
and every releasee who does need supervision will receive
it”). Congress aimed, then, to use the district courts’ discre-
tionary judgment to allocate supervision to those releasees
who needed it most. But forbidding the reimposition of su-
pervised release after revocation and reimprisonment would
be fundamentally contrary to that scheme. A violation of
the terms of supervised release tends to conﬁrm the judg-
ment that help was necessary, and if 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. He is the problem case among problem
cases, and a Congress asserting that “every releasee who
does need supervision will receive it,” ibid., seems very un-