In the new millennium, in Russia and the West alike, criminologists regularly complain about a diminishing role for experts in the making and administration of criminal policy – in the West, because of pandering to the public (penal populism), and in Russia, a failure to take a systematic approach to crime control. In both places, this paper argues, these appraisals are based on idealized and unrealistic images of the way criminal law developed in the past. In North America, criminal policy-making has never conformed to a rational model as favored by some specialists in public administration. In Russia, the European ideal of a major role for criminal law scholars has been confined to periods of codification and has not served as the norm most of the time. In both parts of the world, it is essential that scholars study how criminal policy develops, in order to understand the current situation and find ways to contribute to its making.