Published: May 1, 2007

An Inside Job

Barb Hagen couldn't save the troubled middle-schoolers she taught for 20 years. Now she helps inmates get their lives back on track.

Barb Hagen guides her Saturn SUV north along an empty stretch of Vermont highway. The panorama outside her windshield resembles an Ansel Adams photograph—evergreens almost black in the weak morning light, snow-covered fields stark white.

She passes a yellow sign that warns “Moose next 5,000 feet,” then gets off the highway and glides along a country road. She checks the temperature gauge on her dashboard: 2 degrees.

Just before 7 a.m., she pulls into the parking lot outside Northwest State Correctional Facility, a cluster of low-slung brick buildings surrounded by chain-link fence and shiny...