From predictive policing to probation risk scores, the potential uses of big data in criminal justice systems pose serious legal and ethical challenges relating to due process, discrimination, and the presumption of innocence. Criminal justice systems are using technological solutions, for instance, to predict future crimes of those applying for bail or those to be sent on a parole. The idea of such “automated justice” is to vaporize biases, heuristics and to confine fundamentally value-based decisions to “clean and pure” mathematical reason. There are clear benefits deriving from calculating the risks of misconduct and risk assessments have become relatively standard practice in the criminal systems, e.g. for correctional placement and in the sentencing phase. Such assessment in the sentencing procedure was utilised long before the development of ICT, but algorithms and big data tools for determining prison sentences or for deciding on a parole are relatively newer practices.