Potential biases in crime policies and practices exist across a large number of possible groups and categories, including race, class, age, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, nationality, and religion. Rather than simple or one-dimensional, the role of bias in criminal justice policies and practices is multidimensional and intersecting, with biases of different origins finding different points to seep into the process and compound one another. For instance, police practices that make it more likely for members of some groups to come into contact with the criminal justice system are compounded by prosecutorial and judicial policies that use prior contact with the criminal justice system as a strike against defendants.

By far the most research on criminal justice bias in the U.S. context has involved race; thus, ...