Biometrics Giant Accenture Quietly Took Over LA Residents’ Jail Reform Plan

In November 2020, Los Angeles voters moved to radically transform the way the county handled incarceration. That year, Angelenos filled the streets, joining worldwide protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The mood was ripe for change, and a ballot initiative known as Measure J passed with 57 percent support, amending the LA County charter so that jailing people before trial would be treated as a last resort. Ten percent of the county’s general fund would be allocated to community-led alternatives to incarceration that prioritized diversion, job training, and health programs. 

But years later, as Measure J finally, slowly, gets implemented, advocates say that changes meant to divert money from law enforcement might instead just funnel it back to them. 

Case in point: In June, LA County signed over the handling of changes to pretrial detention under Measure J to the consulting firm Accenture, a behemoth in the world of biometric databases and predictive policing. Accenture has led the development of “intelligent public safety” platforms and tech-enabled risk assessment tools for national security and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world, including in Israel and India. An Accenture advisory panel working on the Measure J implementation includes former federal and local law enforcement agents.

Accenture’s role was further publicized Monday after Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit focused on injustice in the legal system, sent a letter to the LA County Board of Supervisors calling on them to immediately cancel the company’s contract. The contract takes the county away from its stated vision for a “care first, jails last” approach and toward carceral policies, CRC wrote in the letter. “Already, Accenture has concluded that electronic monitoring is a ‘favorable alternative’ to incarceration, ignoring the reality that electronic monitoring is expensive, unsupported by social science, and demonstrably racially biased as applied in Los Angeles,” the letter adds. “This is unsurprising: the consultants working on the Contract have deep ties to police departments and prisons.”

Measure J was one of at least 20 local criminal justice reform efforts that passed nationwide in the six months after Floyd’s murder. It was also part of a string of major wins by advocates in Los Angeles, who had been pushing alternatives to incarceration and investment in social services long before 2020. 

Measure J ran into predictable opposition: A group including the union for Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies sued to block the measure and delayed it from going into effect in 2021, but it was put back on track after a judge upheld it on appeal last year. Nationally, despite widespread support, the criminal justice reform wave was met by a well-funded and bipartisan opposition led by police, sheriffs, and conservative Republicans and Democrats who fearmongered about rising crime. In the years since the 2020 uprisings, efforts to reallocate police funding, implement federal and local police reforms, and invest in social services have been undone or derailed. Many of those who cheered the reform movement are frustrated that they haven’t seen the impact of so many policy wins. Accenture’s contract for Measure J shows another reason why. 

Criminal justice reforms are “being cannibalized,” said Matyos Kidane, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an abolitionist community group based in Skid Row. Kidane said the group organizes against reforms because of the way corporations and law enforcement groups exploit and defang such initiatives. He pointed to Axon, which has profited massively from the push to get police equipped with body cameras. 

“It’s a golden opportunity for them,” Kidane said. When Measure J passed, “Accenture was ready to go once this opportunity presented itself.” 

Accenture has not publicly announced the contract with Los Angeles County, which was signed in June 2023 without a competitive bidding process for a total of $8.6 million over two and a half years. The contract exceeded the $200,000 limit in state law and county charter for a sole-source contract, and the board of supervisors created a motion to allow the requirement to be skirted in order to implement Measure J. But that motion allowed for a contract of up to $3 million, far less than the final signing price. The county told The Intercept it had paid $2 million to Accenture so far. (The supervisors who signed the motion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Even if it were entered into legally — which it was not — the Contract is duplicative, wasteful, and harmful to Los Angeles and should be canceled on policy grounds alone,” the Civil Rights Corp letter states. 

In presentations made in August to the Los Angeles Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department, which is administering the contract (published in September by the accountability group Expose Accenture) the firm gave an overview of its project timeline and plans to engage stakeholders in focus groups, interviews, workshops, and site visits. The firm highlighted targets for “quick wins” by October 1, 2023, such as creating a county website and launching marketing and communications for “Justice Involved Individuals” (i.e., people who have been arrested) and summarized top lines of conversations with 50 such people, including the observation that there was wide support for electronic monitoring as an alternative to custody. 

A spokesperson for the county CEO, which controls county budget decisions, directed questions about the CRC letter to JCOD, as did Accenture. Department spokesperson Avi Bernard did not answer specific questions about how the county raised the limit for the contract but told The Intercept that JCOD had used approved county procedures and consulted with county counsel throughout the contract process. Bernard said CRC had previously raised similar concerns. “County Counsel and Board reviewed these concerns and found no issues with continuing the contract,” Bernard said. He added that there had been “no conversations with Accenture” and JCOD related to the use of electronic monitoring. 

Bernard said that so far, Accenture had designed an independent pretrial services agency for the county, incorporated input from stakeholders, and supported a hotline, website, and marketing campaign. Bernard said the firm has now deployed a three-person implementation team to launch the independent pretrial services agency and is helping JCOD develop a case management IT system.

“It’s talking left while running off with the profiteers of mass surveillance and detention.”

The fact that Accenture was even an option for implementing Measure J came as a shock to many of its supporters, who had watched the county meet with community partners interested in helping carry out its implementation. The contract was also news to some county supervisors, according to advocates with knowledge of the contract process.

“It’s worse than talk left, walk right politics,” said Nika Soon-Shiong, founder and executive director at the Fund for Guaranteed Income and a Ph.D. researcher on digital identification systems. “It’s talking left while running off with the profiteers of mass surveillance and detention.”

Accenture has pushed counterterror and policing strategies around the globe: The company built the world’s biggest biometric identification system in India, which has used similar technologies to surveil protesters and conduct crowd control as part of efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to investigate the citizenship of Muslim residents. And in Israel, Accenture acquired the cybersecurity firm Maglan in 2016 and has worked to facilitate collaboration between India and Israel aimed at “fostering inclusive economic growth and maximizing human potential.” 

Accenture ballooned into a giant in federal consulting over the course of the “war on terror,” winning hundreds of millions of dollars in lucrative contracts from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security for projects from a “virtual border” to recruiting and hiring Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. In 2006, Accenture won a $10 million contract for a DHS biometric ID program, the world’s second biggest, to collect and share biometric data on foreign nationals entering or leaving the U.S. The company has also worked with police departments in Seattle and in the United Kingdom. Jimmy Etheredge, Accenture’s former CEO for North America, sits on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation. 

Asked about Accenture’s international work on biometric identification, predictive policing, and national security, Bernard, the JCOD spokesperson, said the firm was involved in many different kinds of work. “Accenture is a large, international consulting firm with many lines of business. The specific consultants assigned to this project are part of a team in Accenture dedicated to the public sector. Their team comes from a variety of backgrounds, primarily in the health and human services industry.” 

But several LA-based advocates told The Intercept that the contract is yet another development that calls into question the county’s commitment to real criminal justice reform. The county has missed all of its deadlines for a plan to close the notoriously inhumane Men’s Central Jail, even as deaths in custody continue apace. In August, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued a Request for Information for a biometric identification system.

“I’m genuinely confused about how we ended up with this Accenture contract, especially as someone who participated in the development of the Care First, Jails Last (ATI) report,” said Danielle Dupuy-Watson, CEO of CRC, referring to an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group commissioned by the county. “We hoped for transparency and accountability but instead we were gaslit.” 

Behind-the-scenes deals like the one with Accenture are one reason that popular reforms haven’t come to fruition, said Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network. 

“There’s the performance of democracy on the front end where a policy gets pressured into place, and on the back end there’s no governance.”

“People vote in that direction, and then it doesn’t happen. And they chalk it up to, ‘Well, politicians ain’t shit,’” Steppling said. People assume, he added, that when policy is passed, bureaucrats work out its implementation. “What we’re learning is there’s the performance of democracy on the front end where a policy gets pressured into place, and on the back end there’s no governance. It just simply gets procured and contracted away to these consulting firms.” 

That the county took a historic progressive reform and contracted it out to a firm that put the community’s plans back into the hands of law enforcement is a perfect expression of the problem, Steppling said. “There’s no democracy there. There’s no transparency there. Nobody even knows it’s happening.”

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