NYC paid McKinsey $27.5m to reduce violence at Riker's, producing useless recommendations backed by junk evidence

Consulting giant McKinsey -- notorious price-gougers and architects of ICE's gulags -- took on a contract to help reduce violence at Riker's Island, and, $27.5m later, produced nothing but a set of trite and pointless recommendations that were largely ignored, backed by "research" that both McKinsey personnel and Riker's guards helped to falsify.

Though McKinsey and city officials deny any falsification, Propublica's public records requests, interviews with sources with first-hand knowledge, and former corrections commissioner Joseph Ponte's sworn deposition all show that the program's overseers and designers "were cherry-picking docile inmates" to make it seem that the program was working.

The program was called Restart, and it was formulated without any input from inmates or clinic staff "or others with direct insights into drivers of violence." Instead, the McKinsey team observed and communicated with the guards, whose mindset their adopted, attracting censure from a higher-up who warned them off a burgeoning obsession with tasers, shotguns and "aggressive dogs."

McKinsey also produced a high-priced data analytics package for Rikers, which was never put into use -- the $5.5m program crashed the jail's antiquated computers, and relied on technologically unskilled guards and supervisors to correctly input large amounts of data and interpret the analysis the system produced.

Ultimately, McKinsey produced a 14-point plan based on spectacular results from the Restart pilot programs, even as consultants and guards both scrambled to exclude violence-prone prisoners from those test populations, revising their exclusion list whenever there were flare-ups of violence in the test units.

The 14-point plan was pretty anodyne, with things like "improved educational opportunities" and "more guard training." Ultimately, it proved no more useful than the data analytics package. Read the rest