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She was forced by economic hardship to turn to the drug trade, she claimed. She had kids and grandkids to fee. But federal courts, including the Supreme Court, rejected her appeals. Prosecutors opposed a motion to reduce her sentence, citing federal guidelines based on the large quantity of drugs involved.

President Barack Obama, who commuted the sentences of hundreds of federal inmates convicted of drug crimes, rejected clemency for her. Conscious of critics nipping at his heels, Obama scrupulously took his time with clemency or pardon requests. Trump relies on his instincts, turning the review process into another pseudo-reality TV show -- "Celebrity Pardons," former Obama adviser David Axelrod calls it.

I can't say for certain that the lure of performing a good deed that Obama had not done gave Alice Johnson's clemency more appeal, as it apparently did for Jack Johnson's pardon. But I'm sure it didn't hurt her chances either.

Rather than criticize Trump's good deed, I encourage him to do more. Before Trump's election, reversing the 30-year explosion in our prison population was becoming a bipartisan issue. He could bring that back, if he wants to have a real impact on our criminal justice system.

For his humanitarian aid to Alice Johnson, Trump deserves credit. But he'll deserve even more credit when he does something to help the nation's other 576,000 prison inmates -- 39 percent of the nation's 1.46 million prison population -- who experts at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law believe to be incarcerated with little public safety rationale.

That number -- 576,000 -- comes from a three-year study that the Brennan Center published in December, titled "How Many Americans Are Unnecessarily Incarcerated?" Releasing these inmates would save $20 billion annually, enough to employ 270,000 new police officers, 360,000 probation officers or 327,000 school teachers.

Conservatives want to save money. Liberals want to reverse the growth of mass incarceration and other forms of "slavery by another name," as some historians and civil rights activists call it, since Reconstruction. The elements of a compromise are there for a self-professed savvy dealmaker like Trump to cut a deal, if he wants to.

When Trump at Sylvester Stallone's suggestion pardoned the late African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who had been convicted on racially loaded charges 105 years earlier, I was asked sarcastically by some pro-Trump readers, "Why don't you just say, 'Thank you'?"

I'm waiting, I responded, to see what the president does for black people who are still alive.

After Alice Johnson's clemency, I am now waiting to see what Trump will do to help other unnecessarily incarcerated, nonviolent offenders, even if they don't have a Hollywood celebrity on their side.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.