Marathon County presents first justice-system key performance indicators; officials flag data limits and next steps

Marathon County officials on March 7 presented the county’s first consolidated key performance indicator reports for justice-system programs, showing 2024 service volumes and outcomes across diversion, pretrial supervision, treatment and testing programs.

County Administrator Lance said the KPI effort centralizes data from Attic Correctional Services and other partners so the board and public can see “how much we do, how well we do it and whether anyone is better off.” He framed the work as a starting point, not a finished product.

The reports pull information that previously lived in multiple systems and spreadsheets into Power BI dashboards that update as case managers enter data. Michael Schultz, Marathon County’s data officer, described technical work to standardize hundreds of event codes, build automated reports and push weekly case-manager summaries. Laura Yari, the county’s justice systems coordinator, described program-level findings and operational context for each KPI.

“Now that we’re able to pull information through lots and lots of coding, that black box … is just pages and pages of me manually programming what we need to pull out of these systems,” Schultz said. He said case managers now receive an automated…