It sounds like there are some valid methodological criticisms that can be made of this criminal prediction paper. But I don't like the rush to condemn the paper as "pseudo science" just because it has implications that the OP is uncomfortable with. The OP's main point, which could have been made far more succinctly, is that "criminality" is a human judgment that encodes bias, and therefore the paper authors' machine learning methods were merely trained to learn these biases. I don't think anyone will claim that there's a perfect criminal justice system anywhere. But to dismiss these results off hand on the basis that criminal justice systems are imperfect is extremely hasty. The OP is too close minded by politically correct ideology to even consider that one might actually be able to accurately predict criminality with such a methodology.

There are many behaviors we can predict about a person with a high degree of confidence just by looking at an image of him. Why is predicting criminality not one of these behaviors? If the premise is nonsense then it won't stand up to further scrutiny. OP should do a larger study that addresses the methodological deficiencies in the original paper. Definitively shoot down this paper with hardcore research and gain widespread critical acclaim.