Any process involved in sustaining CRISPR repeat clusters, including capture of new spacer elements, expansion or contraction of clusters, propagation of the leader sequence and repeat clusters within a genome, transfer of repeat clusters and CRISPR-associated (cas) genes to new genomes, transcription of the CRISPR repeat arrays into RNA and processing, and interaction of CRISPR/cas loci with the host genome. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) elements are a family of sequence elements containing multiple direct repeats of 24-48 bp with weak dyad symmetry which are separated by regularly sized nonrepetitive spacer sequences.