The Detention Center
Marquette County Jail
- Operated byMarquette County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address67 W. Park Street, PO Box 630, Montello, WI 53949
- BedsDesigned capacity of 60 beds; average daily population of 32 over the 12 months preceding an April 28, 2025 PREA audit
- Jail AdministratorKari Tomlin
Source: Marquette County Final PREA Audit Report 2025 · checked 2026-09-19
Transparency rating
6/10Partial- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✓PREA audits
- ✓Independent inspection
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✓How to post bond
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds60 (designed capacity, per 2025 PREA audit)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Joseph R. Konrath
- Runs the jailMarquette County Sheriff's Office has custody of the Marquette County Jail
- How the office is filledElected, four-year term, Wis. Stat. ch. 59
- Statutory basisWis. Stat. ch. 59 (county sheriff)
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Marquette County, WI - Sheriff · checked 2026-09-19
The Judges
Wisconsin circuit court judges are elected on a nonpartisan ballot to six-year terms under Wis. Const. art. VII — state judicial officers, not county officials.
Marquette County Circuit Court
- Not found
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-19
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardMarquette County Board of Supervisors (Chair: Chuck Bornhoeft; Vice Chair: Lance Achterberg) →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Sheriff's Office PREA page hosts policy documents and annual compliance/audit reports spanning 2020-2025, including a full 2025 PREA facility audit (45 of 45 standards met) that also gives capacity and population figures — used for both 'prea' and 'inspections' and 'capacity' checks.
- The 2025 PREA audit records one staff-on-inmate sexual-abuse allegation (found unfounded after camera-footage review) and one inmate-on-inmate sexual-harassment allegation (did not meet the definition), with zero substantiated cases; no inmate deaths are mentioned in that report.
- The Sheriff's Office 2025 annual report (Sheriff.pdf) separately discusses 12 death investigations countywide (including two child deaths and two fentanyl overdose deaths) — these are general law-enforcement death investigations, not disclosures of in-custody jail deaths, so 'deaths' is marked no.
- Sheriff's page links an off-domain inmate bond payment portal (team3.inmatecanteen.com) and a Huber/electronic monitoring rules PDF; bond_info marked yes because the sheriff's own page publishes/labels the bond payment link.
- No on-site inmate roster, jail housing contracts with other counties, or a published fee schedule were found on the county's own site.
- State inspection/oversight: Wisconsin county jails, including Marquette County Jail, are subject to state jail standards under Wis. Admin. Code DOC 350 (Wisconsin DOC Division of Community Corrections); not independently confirmed via a DOC-specific document during this pass, though the county's own PREA audit process is consistent with this oversight regime.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Marquette County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-19 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered