Sheriff sees turnaround in jail staffing

By Kevin O’Brien

Five months after Sheriff Chad Billeb said the Marathon County Jail was facing a “crisis level” staffing shortage, enough applicants have stepped forward to potentially fill all of the county’s vacant corrections officer positions.

Chief Deputy Bill Millhausen told the Public Safety committee last week that the sheriff’s department can report some “good news on staffing” following an increase in starting wages and an aggressive recruitment campaign.

“As of right now, all of the positions are accounted for with applicants moving through the process,” he said. “So, assuming that they all make it all the way through, we would find ourselves fully staffed.”

Millhausen said they are hoping to fill 15 vacancies, and once qualified applicants pass background checks and psychological evaluations, they can be hired.

“Things are looking really good,” he said. Last September, Sheriff Billeb told the committee that his office only had two applicants for 14 positions in the corrections department, and he was forced to call in patrol deputies off the road and have them work overtime hours in order to fill the minimum jail staffing required by the state.

At that time, he said the state had raised its starting wage for prison guards to $33 per hour and Wood County was considering boosting its starting wage to $26. Marathon County has since increased its starting wage from $23 to $26 per hour for new correction officers, but only after they have completed a 16-week training period. (After one year of employment, they will receive a $1,500 lump sum as compensation for the lower wage they earned during training).

Millhausen said being fully staffed at the jail will allow the county to bring back most

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Chad Billeb Jail staffing

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of the inmates currently housed in other counties. Out of the 288 inmates within Marathon County’s jurisdiction, he said roughly 80 of them are jailed in other counties and another 19 are on electronic bracelet monitoring.

“We can definitely bring those back from out-of-county housing, the majority of them,” he said, noting that it will take a few months to get new recruits fully trained.

In September, Sheriff Billeb said the county was in danger of having to house “a vast majority” of its inmates in other counties, which could have cost the department over $3 million per year.

Millhausen’s comments about the turnaround in jail staffing came during an update on the county’s juvenile detention center, which was temporarily closed in 2022 due to financial problems. Last year, he said the county implemented a new business model for the facility and signed new contracts with higher rates for counties that send juveniles to Marathon County.

As a result, he said the center went from serving 33 counties and generating $210,000 in revenue in 2021 to 46 counties utilizing the facility last year, bringing in $1.2 million in revenue.

“It’s been a tremendous success,” he said. “Our staff out at the juvenile center have been working tirelessly to make sure we can continue that business model.”

Going forward, Sheriff Billeb said the “next big improvement” will require reviewing the county’s inmate population, with a focus on how long inmates are remaining in custody and what delays may be keeping them in jail. Of the 288 current inmates, he noted that only 29 of them have actually been sentenced.

“That ratio is very skewed,” he said. The county’s circuit courts have “done a really good job” of moving criminal cases through the system more quickly, he said, but Marathon County’s ratio of sentenced to non-sentenced inmates is still out of line with most other counties in the state.

Sheriff Billeb said he recently met with District Attorney Theresa Wetzsteon and the county’s data officer, Michal Schultz, to discuss how the county can assess the different reasons why people are in custody for so long.

“I think that needs to be our next big push,” he said. “If we’re looking at managing our jail population, we need to understand that.”