A number of small structures and processes have a marked effect on the formulation of criminal justice policy in its opening stages before legislation and implementation. These structures and processes explain much of the policy's character and deserve attention. The author does not deal with the content of policymaking; he concentrates on the everyday policymaking that is stirred less by big events in the outside world than by the commonplace internal processes of bureaucracy itself. He bases his description on a succession of linked empirical studies of policymaking in government departments in Canada and England and Wales between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, drawing on published research on policies for victims and prosecution witnesses initiated in the 1980s, on the origins and development of the Home Office Programme Development Unit's first initiative in the early 1990s, and on the decision taken by the Prison Department in the late 1960s to transform Holloway Prison for women into a secure hospital. Footnotes, references