President Donald Trump’s decision on Wednesday to commute the prison sentence of Alice Johnson—a 63-year-old woman who was unjustly punished with life without parole for a non-violent drug offense—is “unambiguously good,” in the words of one commentator.

“I urge the president to do the same for other federal prisoners serving extreme sentences that don’t match the offenses, while reforming our draconian sentencing laws that produce these senseless punishments.”
—Jennifer Turner, ACLU

It also remains the case that Trump has contributed to the racist criminal justice system that put Johnson behind bars for over two decades by boosting the private prison industry, hiring an attorney general who is eagerly working to worsen America’s mass incarceration crisis, and advocating for the death penalty for non-violent drug offenders, as numerous criminal justice reform advocates pointed out on the heels of Trump’s announcement.

“Trump stumbled into a good thing with this Alice Johnson [commutation]. Meanwhile, he’s actively working to make sure federal prisons fill up with men and women just like her,” writer Britni Danielle observed in a series of tweets. “Trump’s pardon of Alice Johnson has less to do with her plight (or caring about people caught up in the hell of mandatory minimums, because he’s totally fine with those), and more to do with wanting to please his famous associates.”

Investigative journalist Alex Kotch added that if Trump wants to prove that this clemency was more than the one-time product of a celebrity pressure campaign by Kim Kardashian West and that he actually cares about America’s deeply unjust criminal justice system, he will “continue mass pardons that Obama began.”