On the front lines of efforts to rebuild the country’s infrastructure under a plan central to President Joe Biden’s re-election pitch are the inmates in the Mansfield and Richland correctional institutions in Ohio.  

Prisoners are attending a local community college program training them to climb 150-foot cellphone towers to install and repair equipment needed to expand broadband and 5G internet access, preparing them for jobs that companies have been desperate to fill once they leave incarceration. 

“We’ve got more jobs than people,” Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, a Republican who leads the state’s workforce efforts, said in an interview. “In the past, someone would have said, ‘You’re spending this money [on inmates] and taking my job.’ But now, nobody wants these jobs. Nobody’s waiting in line for these jobs. They can’t find anybody to take them.”

Expanding broadband access is just one of the areas in which state and industry officials are scrambling to find workers as $550 billion in new federal infrastructure funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was passed in 2021, begins to come their way. But with unemployment hovering around historic lows, they are turning to whatever untapped pockets of potential workers they can find to fill the hundreds of thousands of jobs economists expect the federal spending to create.

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