When people think about the criminal justice system, they typically focus on police, prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys. Less visible but structurally significant is the influence of county Boards of Commissioners, who hold the purse strings for prosecutors, public defenders, and jails — creating the capacity to control a county’s justice system from multiple angles without ever appearing in a courtroom. Through budget authority and, in some jurisdictions, appointment power, boards can shape who gets prosecuted, which cases move forward, and the broader culture inside a prosecutor’s office. That influence is rarely transparent and largely unaccountable through existing oversight mechanisms.
The Power Behind the Curtain
Forty-nine out of every fifty criminal cases filed in the United States are handled by local prosecutors. The overwhelming majority of the criminal legal system’s work happens at the county level, administered by elected prosecutors who are formally independent but practically dependent on the county administrative infrastructure that surrounds them. That infrastructure — including the Board of Commissioners — holds two things prosecutors need: budgets and, in some jurisdictions, appointment authority. The combination is structurally significant in ways that are rarely subject to public scrutiny.
Prosecutor’s offices rely on county funding to pay assistant prosecutors, investigators, victim advocates, and administrative staff. Budgets also determine how much money is available for expert witnesses, forensic testing, office training, and specialized units — including public integrity units, diversion programs, and wrongful conviction review processes. A board that controls those resources controls the practical capacity of the office without controlling any individual charging decision. The influence is structural rather than direct, which makes it more difficult to detect and easier to sustain.
In some jurisdictions, the board’s influence extends further. When an elected prosecutor vacates office mid-term — through resignation, removal, or retirement — the board may play a direct role in selecting or approving the replacement who serves until the next election. Even where prosecutors are elected, boards wield influence by controlling resources and setting local policy priorities that shape the institutional environment in which prosecutorial decisions are made.
Not all boards exercise the same degree of influence. Kalamazoo County’s organizational chart, for example, depicts elected officials and courts as separate entities from the board — a structural design that reflects an intent to maintain some functional independence. In other counties, boards have direct oversight over prosecutors and courts, creating more explicit influence over who gets prosecuted and which cases move forward. The variation underscores that the degree of influence is partly a function of how county governance is structured, and that structural transparency matters for accountability.
What Board Influence Looks Like in Practice
The influence of a Board of Commissioners on a prosecutor’s office rarely operates through explicit direction. It operates through the structural conditions boards create and the signals they send — conditions and signals that shape prosecutorial culture and decision-making without requiring any documented exercise of authority over specific cases.
A board can pressure a prosecutor to prioritize certain types of offenses — harsher enforcement of drug offenses, for example — by funding specialized units for those priorities and defunding others. It can discourage investigations into politically connected individuals by refusing to fund the investigative capacity that such investigations require, or by expressing concerns about the cost-effectiveness of particular case categories during public budget discussions. It can strangle reform efforts by blocking budget increases for diversion programs, low-income housing initiatives, public integrity units, or wrongful conviction review processes — treating these programs as optional expenditures while funding conventional prosecution operations as core.
The more subtle mechanisms are often more powerful than the overt ones. Public board meetings in which commissioners praise specific prosecutions — noting “tough” results in cases that align with board priorities — while remaining silent about or criticizing others send an unmistakable signal to the prosecutor’s office about the kinds of cases the board values. In smaller counties especially, where the relationships between prosecutors, commissioners, judges, and local political networks are closely interwoven, those signals carry institutional weight that affects how discretion is exercised.
Prosecutors who step outside a board’s priorities or political comfort zone may find staffing requests denied, salary increase proposals rejected, and technology upgrade requests deprioritized — all without any formal statement connecting these resource decisions to specific case decisions. The connection can be understood by everyone involved without ever being documented anywhere. Retaliation for “going against the grain” can happen behind closed doors in ways that leave no paper trail and require no formal exercise of authority.
The Separation of Powers Problem
Prosecutors are executive-function actors in the constitutional structure of American governance. Their charging decisions — who to charge, what to charge, what plea to offer, what sentence to seek — are supposed to be grounded in evidence, law, and the public interest. The separation of powers that underlies democratic governance requires that the executive function — including prosecution — operate with independence from the legislative and administrative functions that boards represent.
When board political interests enter charging decisions or plea negotiations, the result is not just an abstract constitutional problem. It produces two systems of justice: one for individuals whose cases align with board political priorities, and another for everyone else. A politically connected individual whose investigation would embarrass the board has a different experience of justice than a person without those connections. That disparity is not a malfunction of the system — it is what the system produces when prosecutorial independence is structurally compromised.
Among the most damaging forms of board influence is the suppression of prosecutorial reform efforts through budget control. When boards deny funding for diversion programs that reduce recidivism, block the creation of public integrity units that would investigate official misconduct, or defund wrongful conviction review processes that would surface past errors, they are not merely making budget decisions. They are using administrative authority to prevent the justice system from examining and correcting its own failures. That pattern — using budget control to preserve the status quo against reforms that would expose institutional problems — is among the most direct ways that board influence compromises justice.
The Barry County Context
Clutch Justice’s ongoing coverage of Barry County has documented patterns of administrative and institutional pressure on the local justice system — patterns that illustrate in documented form the structural dynamics analyzed in this piece. The Barry County Board of Commissioners’ role in managing resources for the county’s justice infrastructure, alongside the documented sentencing departure pattern in the 5th Circuit and the governance failures Clutch Justice has covered in related litigation, reflects how the dynamics described here operate in a specific Michigan county context.
The intersection of board budget authority, prosecutorial decision-making, and judicial conduct in a small county environment is not unique to Barry County. But Barry County’s documented record — including active litigation in Behovitz et al. v. Barry County and Greathouse v. Barry County et al. — makes it one of the more fully documented cases of these dynamics operating in a specific Michigan jurisdiction. For the full archive, see the Barry County tag archive.
What Structural Reform Requires
Budget decisions affecting prosecutors’ offices should be documented with sufficient specificity to make any connection between resource decisions and specific case categories traceable through public records. When staffing requests are denied or program budgets are cut, the documented rationale should be available for public review. Transparency about the basis for resource decisions is the minimum precondition for accountability about their effects.
In jurisdictions where boards participate in filling mid-term prosecutorial vacancies, the process should be governed by objective criteria applied through a transparent selection process with independent review. Appointment processes in which a board selects a replacement prosecutor without independent oversight create obvious conditions for political alignment to govern prosecutorial selection — the precise conflict the appointment process should be designed to prevent.
Diversion programs, public integrity units, and wrongful conviction review processes should be funded through mechanisms that insulate them from year-to-year board discretion that can be exercised on the basis of political rather than effectiveness criteria. When the existence of accountability programs depends entirely on annual board approval, those programs are structurally vulnerable to being defunded precisely when they are most needed — when institutional pressures argue against accountability.
Communications between board members and prosecutors’ offices about specific case categories, enforcement priorities, or resource decisions should be documented and subject to public records access. The current environment in which board influence operates through informal signals — public meeting comments, private conversations, implicit alignment expectations — is precisely the environment in which accountability through documentation is impossible. Documentation requirements would not eliminate political pressure, but they would make it visible.
Sources
Rita Williams, How a Board of Commissioners Can Influence Prosecutions and Why It Matters, Clutch Justice (May 2, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/05/02/how-a-board-of-commissioners-can-influence-prosecutions-and-why-it-matters/.
Williams, R. (2025, May 2). How a board of commissioners can influence prosecutions and why it matters. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/05/02/how-a-board-of-commissioners-can-influence-prosecutions-and-why-it-matters/
Williams, Rita. “How a Board of Commissioners Can Influence Prosecutions and Why It Matters.” Clutch Justice, 2 May 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/05/02/how-a-board-of-commissioners-can-influence-prosecutions-and-why-it-matters/.
Williams, Rita. “How a Board of Commissioners Can Influence Prosecutions and Why It Matters.” Clutch Justice, May 2, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/05/02/how-a-board-of-commissioners-can-influence-prosecutions-and-why-it-matters/.
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