ABSTRACT
The organization and politics of criminal justice policy making are currently in flux. One source of change has been a partial turning away from the once standard processes of internal consultation, from committee meetings, briefings and circulating files, towards procedures that are more fragmentary, centrifugal and loosely bounded. The newest modes of policy making are themselves the fruits of a new politics of populism, moralism, and the market. Attempting to reform such matters as the organization of the police and prisons, the incarceration of young offenders, and the ‘right to silence’, a number of Home Office ministers appear recently to have been impelled by a strong sense of the political, by personal volition, a doughty common sense, and appeals to what are thought to be popular sentiment. Political approval translates an idea into a political mandate, an internal notion into an external action, and ‘going to ministers’ is a transition for which there has to be considerable preparation.
