In the 1940s, Steve Shelton’s grandfather dressed up — white shirt, tie, fedora — to take the streetcar to the steel mill where he would change into work clothes, and would shower before dressing up to return home. “There was,” Shelton says, “such dignity in the trades back then.”

There still is at the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh (TIP) that Shelton launched. There, in what used to be a Westinghouse Electric factory, some men, many in their 30s looking for their first legal jobs, and a few women learn to wield trowels and mortar, thereby deriving from bricklaying (and welding, carpentry and painting) a dignity they did not feel when they grew up on this city’s meanest streets, or when, for 85% of them, their incarcerations ended.

Shelton, 59, was 12 when he first was taken to a construction site. “I just wanted to build stuff,” so after enjoying two things in high school (wood shop, metal shop), serving in the Navy and working in the trades, he started a business “out of the trunk of my car.” Eventually, however, he wondered: “Where are all the young guys?” He saw: “Everyone was being pushed to college.” He thought: “Having guys 55 or 60 years old on top of scaffolding, laying bricks, is not sustainable.”

He knew there were guys like him “who want to work with their hands.” Many were coming out of jail. Shelton talked with churches and civic organizations, and eventually the local Mellon (banking) and Heinz (ketchup, etc.) foundations. One thing led to another, and to this: The abandoned factory — deindustrialization has upsides — has a floor covered with bricks, cinder blocks, tubs of mortar and people trying to get the hang of building things, and get on the bottom rung of the ladder of upward mobility.

Things were made in the factory in the 1920s when Pittsburgh, then America’s 9th most populous city (in 1920 it was just ahead of Los Angeles) made the nation’s steel ligaments. In 2020, builders are made in the factory. Pittsburgh, now 66th in population, has put aside smokestacks and remade itself around technology and health care. It has, however, a construction boom — partly a result of Pennsylvania’s fracking — and a shortage of workers for the building trades.

Shelton’s $1.4 million annual budget, from private and public sources, enables him and his staff “to take someone from nothing to a living wage in 10 weeks.” Cameron Meadows, TIP’s assistant masonry instructor, served 10 years for shooting someone in a bar fight, long before TIP changed his life. Shelton notes that when his human reclamation program prevents someone from spending 60 years in prison, costing Pennsylvania $50,000 a year, “I’ve saved taxpayers 3 million bucks.”

One in 38 American adults is incarcerated, on probation or on parole. Many former inmates return to communities where they had barely been connected to its constitutive units — families, schools and civic, religious and commercial institutions. Reintegration — acquiring residences, driver’s licenses, bus passes, bank accounts, health care, child care, employment — can be bewildering, demoralizing and exhausting.