Understanding key trends within the penal field has become a core preoccupation of criminologists in recent decades. However, critical analyses of the emplotment of narratives, or how narratives themselves are constructed and move through the criminal justice system, can be overlooked, a gap that this article aims to address. Drawing on a range of case studies across the criminological literature, the article aims to build on this work by interrogating four key features of policy and practice narratives that have important implications for how we conceptualise, understand and employ narratives to understand policy and practice developments, namely that such narratives are (a) operating at multiple levels of analysis, (b) shaped by diverse and sometimes agonistic voices, (c) informed by vertical and horizontal influences and (d) fluid and dynamic, and as such can vary temporally and situationally. These features and their implications for understanding criminal justice policy and practice developments are explored next, illustrating that policy and practice can flow both into and from narratives.