Julie Haines runs her hand across her wide belly, pressing her swollen fingers along the top curve.

The baby is restless. It's almost time.

Her due date is weeks away, but she knows she won't make it that long.

A mother twice over, the birth doesn't scare her.

But detoxing in jail does.

She'll have to deal with the sweats, vomiting, diarrhea and sleepless nights while her body slips out of the methadone fog she's been under for two years. The powerful prescription drug kept her from using heroin, but it's just as addictive.

"It's 100 times harder to detox from methadone than from the heroin," said Haines, who has experienced methadone withdrawal twice before.

The last time she detoxed, she wanted to die. "If there was a gun there, I would have killed myself."

But the painful and debilitating withdrawal couldn't keep her clean, and she got hooked again. The last time she used heroin was in late 2005, after her baby boy Desmond died of sudden infant death syndrome. He was 10 weeks old. It crushed her.

One week later, in December, Haines was high and pregnant again -- same boyfriend, another baby boy. She kept prostituting, too, to support her addiction.

Two months later, she was back in the Richmond City Jail.

. . .

Now nearly nine months pregnant, Haines is an inmate on H-4, a crowded tier where the most serious and repeat female offenders serve time. It's a place where you can't get a break -- from the noise, from the bathrooms with no privacy, from women begging for the last of your crackers from the jail canteen.

At mealtimes -- 5 and 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. she gets the same amount of food as everyone else, and a little cup of juice. Because she got pregnant back to back, she never lost her baby weight and is now 230 pounds.

Haines forces herself to drink the warm, metallic-tasting water from her tier's fountain. She holds her nose to get it down so her mouth won't be so dry.

"I force myself to drink it, but only for the baby," she said.

Three of the four women's tiers are overcrowded, but unlike the men's side, almost everyone has a bunk bed. H-2, the women's drug-rehab tier, is the only living quarters with more beds than bodies.

When Haines first came to the city jail, she didn't have a bunk bed. Another woman, seeing her late-term pregnancy, gave hers up for Haines -- a favor that's a rarity in jail. 

"Thank God, because otherwise, I'd be on the floor," Haines said.

She buries herself in paperback mysteries and romance novels with pages that are falling out of the broken bindings. The women who live with her pace around the tier. They line up to use the pay phones to call home. They find girlfriends, then break up with them. They play games and wave down deputies to complain that it's too cold or too hot or too loud or whatever comes to mind.

Many sleep all day. Some read or write letters to their boyfriends and children.

Haines looks forward to her one visit each week from her boyfriend, who is the father of all three children, or her mom. They don't get along. Her mother worries that he's not good for her, but she says he's a great father to their 4-year-old daughter, Heaven.

And for the first three months of their new baby's life, he'll care for the child.

. . .

On Sept. 18 at 10 p.m., all 8 pounds and 4 ounces of baby Jaden came into the world at VCU Medical Center. Haines gave birth after 14 hours of labor.

She slept well that night. The soft bed and pillows in the recovery room made her bottom bunk at the jail seem worlds away, even though it was just down the street.

The next day, Haines had her tubes tied. "I don't want to be pregnant ever again. I don't want any more babies."

It costs about $3,500 for a normal birth by an inmate at VCU Medical Center, and the births are paid for by the sheriff's office. On average, five women give birth each year while incarcerated in Richmond.

During Haines' two-day stay at the hospital, she held Jaden a few times before she was sent back to jail. The plan was for her to go straight into medical isolation to begin methadone withdrawal, but there wasn't a cell available. Haines spent her first two nights on the neighboring hall for female inmates on disciplinary isolation.

When a medical cell opened up, she packed all her possessions -- rolls of toilet paper, some books and magazines, her baby's photos from the hospital, toiletries -- and moved again. She carried the plastic bags around the corner, one at a time, to keep from reopening the incision on her lower abdomen. Everything hurts -- her back, her belly, her incision. It'll be days before she gets the Percocet prescribed by the hospital doctor.

The medical cells look just like the ones where they keep the discipline cases: dark and large enough to fit a metal cot, fastened to the wall and covered by a thin, plastic mattress. There's a metal toilet with a sink on top and one shelf. The cell doors are usually open, and the dozen women living in isolation mill about. To Haines' right is a woman with AIDS. To her left is a woman with multiple personalities. Haines knows them all by now.

Some women oooh and aaah over Haines' baby photos.

"Praise Jesus, the Lord works in beautiful ways," one inmate said, looking at the tiny, pink baby.

Haines wants to shower, eat some soup and rest. She'll rest all weekend.

Next week, when she starts coming down from the two-year methadone high, she won't sleep at all.

. . .

Since a boyfriend at Henrico County's J.R. Tucker High School introduced her to drugs, Julie Haines has done anything she had to for heroin. Stealing checks and money from her family, prostituting, selling drugs, whatever.

But shocking even to herself, she was able to stay clean throughout her pregnancy with her first child, 4-year-old Heaven.

Then she returned to drugs.

Two years ago, methadone saved her life. She's been on it since then.

She got picked up this year in Henrico because of a dirty urine screening. She violated her probation on a drug-possession charge. She also has a prostitution conviction in Henrico. After serving a few months there, she was moved this spring to the Richmond jail to serve time for a prostitution conviction.

Since Haines has been in jail, she's been derided by nurses and fellow inmates for taking methadone while pregnant. But medical experts say it's more dangerous to the unborn baby to quit the methadone while pregnant. It's better to continue the drug, then detox mom and baby later. Baby Jaden detoxed quickly and went home with his father.

The feeling is almost unbearable.

"Your muscles ache, you're sick, you can't move, but you can't stop moving," she recalled. "I don't know how I'm going to do it."

Some inmates have tried to get Haines to sell them her methadone. She won't. She needs it to feel normal.

"If I had come in here clean, and I saw someone else getting methadone, I would probably be jealous," she said. "And that's something I have to fight every day."

When she gets out in December, clean and with a new baby to support, she hopes she doesn't fall into the heroin again.

"I'm going to pray. That's all I can do," she said a week before giving birth. "Once you're an addict, you're always an addict. I'm going to try to change everything. I want to take myself out of the environment that caused me to use." Her mother wants her to give up her baby for adoption. She's resistant.

"I just feel like I've lost everything. I can't lose another baby."

. . .

Haines is more lucid now, 15 days after her last dose of methadone. Her eyes are clearer, and she has some color back in her cheeks.

She's past the stomach cramping. Now she's jittery. A night with four consecutive hours of sleep is a major feat. She still has drug dreams, where she fantasizes about getting high.

Best of all, she got to see her baby -- her boyfriend brought him by a couple of days ago. She got to see Jaden's chubby little body for 15 minutes through the Plexiglas window.

She's counting her time in days now, not months. She'll be out for Christmas and for her 26th birthday Dec. 29.

"This has to be it for me. I have to establish a new relationship with my daughter, who I haven't seen in nine months," she said. "They've already told me one dirty urine, and they'll pick me up again."

Haines is nervous but hopes that she'll find a better life for herself and her children.

"The real test is out there."