Week 9 Assignment: Presentation 200 Points Possible Overview For this final assignment, you will prepare a brief paper detailing the steps undertaken to complete a presentation that disseminates infor
Katherine Alexandre
Capella University
SWK5006
Dr. VonTija, Dean-El
November 22, 2025
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 came to play with the vision of minimizing the harm caused by drugs, however its sentencing system brought about the major and unfair inequities. This law put a ratio of 100:1 crack-powder cocaine in place, such that five grams of crack cocaine would cause the same mandatory minimum of five years as 500 grams of powder cocaine (United States Sentencing Commission [USSC], 2022). Since the policing of crack was more apparent in low-income, predominantly black communities, this policy helped to place African Americans in large numbers behind bars.
Reform legislation such as the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 and the First Step Act of 2018 narrowed the gap to 18:1 and retroactively changed some of them. Nevertheless, African Americans still are overrepresented in the population sentenced on crack offenses, and the existing sentencing policies do not align with the principles of the social work concept of social justice and human dignity (Alexander, 2020; National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2021). The given paper is a narrow proposal aimed at dealing with discrimination in federal cocaine sentencing, the outlined leadership competencies that should be employed to facilitate the change, and an evaluation and ethical data-management plan.
Background and Ongoing Discrimination
The initial ratio of 100:1 did not represent any significant pharmacological difference between the crack and powder cocaine. Rather, it appeared at a time of severe rhetoric of the War on Drugs, when the media and political leaders depicted crack as a particularly dangerous type of drug and directly linked it to urban Black crime (Goulian et al., 2022; Tonry, 2019). Crack enforcement focused on the poor Black neighborhoods despite national reports on self-report that drug use was distributed among races. By 1990s, an almost 88 percent of individuals convicted in federal court of crack offenses were African American (Alexander, 2020). The Fair Sentencing Act did not eradicate the disparity even though it lowered the ratio between 18:1 and increased the number of mandatory minimums to raise the quantity threshold. These changes were retroactive to many under the First Step Act, yet present-day sentencing still imposes a harsher sentence on crack than powder and generates racial disparities (USSC, 2022; The Sentencing Project, 2018). Such a structure is incompatible with the NASW (2021) values of social justice and the dignity and the worth of the person by making the use of substances a crime in a manner that is likely to have a disproportionately detrimental impact on one racial group over another. As a social worker, additional reformation is morally required. Plan for Enacting Change The main purpose of this proposal is to correct federal cocaine sentencing by scientific evidence and social work ethics by removing the rest of the crack-powder gap and unnecessary jail time. The federal drug laws would be changed by congress to become 1:1 crack/powder ratio in such a way that equal amounts of drugs would be equally punished and simple possession and low-level distribution mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished. The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) would also update its directions appropriately and directly consider the issue of racial disparity in sentencing. The reform would establish also a national retrospective relief mechanism. The individuals convicted or put under guard on crack offenses, as stipulated in the old laws, were able to file petitions to reduce sentences or release. Federal grant would facilitate the involvement of the public defenders and legal aid organizations to screen qualified clients, prepare petitions, and represent them in court, where the first priority should be given to nonviolent and first-time crimes and persons whose sentences would be far below those it will be under the new system. The third component is community reinvestment. Part of the savings on the cost of reduced incarceration would be channeled to neighborhoods that have been hit the most by the previous crack enforcement. The grants, which would be organized by the Department of Justice and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, would support services of substance use treatment, mental health care, housing, employment, education, and family reunification in collaboration with the organizations led by people with lived experience (Alexander, 2020; Mauer and King, 2007). The implementation would be done in stages. The proposal would be perfected by a coalition of social workers, civil rights groups, people directly affected by the changes, and researchers, and it would be used to build the bipartisan basis and create concise policy briefs and testimony on the racial disparities and the restricted crime-prevention utility of harsh sentencing (Tonry, 2019; USSC, 2022). Once passed, federal agencies would be guided and trained, and the resentencing and grant programs would be put into action. The plan would use approximately 325330m of funds over a period of five or more years, with the majority of the funding coming from savings on reduced correctional spending, along with existing federal grants streams and targeted foundation funding (The Sentencing Project, 2018; USSC, 2022). Leadership Skills and Personal Reflection The application of this plan needs leadership skills that are the key elements to advanced social work practice. It needs to be properly analyzed and advocated; the leaders will need to perceive the sentencing data, integrate the research on the racial disparity and relate this information to an ethical argument based on the NASW Code of Ethics. They also need to talk to policymakers and citizens effectively because they have to interpret the various legal and statistical information into compelling stories. My course work and past assignments have enhanced my research and writing capabilities that would justify this part of the work. It is also important that anti-racist and culturally humble practice is considered since the proposal is a response to the harm that Black communities have been subjected to. The leadership should understand the ways in which racism has influenced drug policy and deliberately give a voice to those most impacted (Alexander, 2020). I am hoping I will continue to learn more about structural racism and will build self-awareness to become culturally humble, but I will also need to interact with affected communities in a more direct way. Other important skills include coalition-building, the ability to communicate in the public, ethical decision-making and project management. Organization and ethical reflection are the personal strengths that I possess, but I should improve the level of confidence when it comes to speaking in front of the crowd, media, and leading a big coalition during field placements, mentorship, and specific professional growth. Evaluation and Ethical Data Management The effective evaluation plan is required to be able to assess the success of the reform. The established goals of success can be measured through sentencing outcomes, racial equity, retroactive relief, and reentry and community well-being. The USSC sentencing data would be used to compare the average sentence length of crack offenses prior to the reform and after it in order to confirm that the disparity between the crack and powder sentencing has been closed. Racial equity would be measured through tracking the shifts in the racial distribution of the people who were caught on cocaine charges and comparing those trends with the national data on drug use (The Sentencing Project, 2018). It would also evaluate the number of the eligible people getting retroactive sentence reductions or release and duration of the process. Housing stability, employment and recidivism would be observed as outcomes in the case of people released under the new policy. Interviews or focus groups with former incarcerated individuals, their families, and service providers, would give qualitative information on the impacts of the reforms on the lives of people and how the community reinvestment programs are implemented at the ground. Ethical standards would be followed in all the data collection. The interviews and surveys would be a voluntary and informed process and the purpose of the evaluation, risks and right of free withdrawal explained. The information on identifying would be separated away from the data and instead and instead of providing data, codes would be used to ensure confidentiality and findings would be reported in aggregate form. Electronic information would be secured with limited accessibility and any study that involved human subjects would undergo an Institutional Review Board. Since the information of most participants could be associated with incarceration-related and racism-related trauma, evaluation staff would receive training on the trauma-informed and culturally responsive approach to reduce the risk of harm to the participants (NASW, 2021). Conclusion A bright illustration of the way in which drug policy can replicate structural racism and devalue the principles of justice and human dignity is the crack-powder cocaine sentencing gap caused by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The Black communities still have to endure the impact of severe sentencing even after partial reforms. The proposal given in this paper is a practical suggestion of the manner in which the leftover gap can be eliminated, to provide retroactive relief and to invest in the health and the stability of the affected areas. It also determines the leadership abilities that social workers should have in order to promote such reforms and gives an evaluation plan aligned to ethical considerations. This form of policy advocacy is core to EPAS Competency 2 and to the overall goal of social work advocacy to question injustice and to ensure the well-being of all human beings.References
Alexander, M. (2020). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (10th anniversary ed.). The New Press.
Goulian, A., Jauffret-Roustide, M., Dambélé, S., Singh, R., & Fullilove, R. E. (2022). A cultural and political difference: Comparing the racial and social framing of population crack cocaine use between the United States and France. Harm Reduction Journal, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-022-00625-5
Mauer, M., & King, R. S. (2007). Unequal justice: African Americans and the criminal justice system. The Sentencing Project.
National Association of Social Workers. (2021). NASW Code of ethics. NASW Press.
The Sentencing Project. (2018). Report to the United Nations on racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system. https://www.sentencingproject.org
Tonry, M. (2019). Rethinking the War on Drugs. Criminology & Public Policy, 18(3), 343–355. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12465
United States Sentencing Commission. (2022). Cocaine and federal sentencing policy: Report to Congress. https://www.ussc.gov/research/reports/cocaine-and-federal-sentencing-policy
