Tiffany Tippit carries Landyn to a car driven by case worker Mike Lewis, who brings the baby back to his foster family. She says she had a good childhood in Oklahoma, but got off track and into drugs when she was 15. Landyn is her second son.

The undercover detective’s cell phone rang. I’m Tiffany, said the young woman on the other end. Her friend had been picked up for dealing, she explained. Now she was calling around to his customers, wondering if she could hook them up.

The detective arranged for a buy two hours later at a laundromat in West Warwick. His phone rang again as he waited there. I’m in the parking lot, Tiffany said. The detective walked up to the passenger side where Tiffany Tippit sat, 19 and five months pregnant with her second child.

As other officers watched from the darkness that November night last year, Tippit exchanged a small plastic bag of cocaine for the officer’s $40. Weeks later, she pleaded no contest to the charge and, because of several previous petty offenses against her, headed to prison for the next four months — 1 of about 75 pregnant women who enter the Adult Correctional Institutions each year.

Nearly all of these women are released before they give birth; most are charged with nonviolent crimes, such as prostitution and drug dealing, and serve only months. But each year, between six and a dozen women give birth while inmates of the state, a number that has been increasing in the last decade as more offenders choose to carry their babies to term, says one prison official.

And so a clash of dramas unfolds; one of life’s most hopeful and precious moments delivered amid the confines of tragedy.

TIFFANY TIPPIT grew up in Oklahoma City, raised by her grandparents.

“I had a good childhood, played softball and stuff like that,” Tippit says one spring morning in a prison conference room inside minimum security. “And then I was probably about 15 when I started going off on the wrong path, hanging around with the wrong people,” doing drugs.

Tiffany says she ran off with her boyfriend and ended up in Rhode Island. She was 17 when she gave birth to her first baby, a boy. The baby tested positive for drug exposure and wound up in state care. Her baby’s father “was not a very good person,” she says. “He just got out of prison here [at the ACI]. I really don’t talk to him.”

Tippit returned to Oklahoma for a time last year, her mother says, where she began dating someone she knew and got pregnant again. By August she was back in Rhode Island, where she went to prison for the first time, 90 days for driving on a suspended license. Prison officials released her at the end of October. Less than a month later, she would be picked up on the drug-selling charge in West Warwick. She began her four-month sentence for drug dealing two weeks before Christmas.

“I thought when I came in I would be the only one who was pregnant,” she says, “but there are a lot here.”

Tippit became friendly with Breanna Davis, 22, of Central Falls, who on this day, sits beside Tippit and is seven months pregnant with her fourth child.

“When I grew up, I loved school,” Davis says. “I was little Miss Central Falls at the time. I remember my mother was trying to drag me to church and keep on me about school and stuff. But as I got in my teens I rebelled and fell into the crowd, you know?”

“Then when I had my first son, I calmed down,” Davis says.

She was 16.

“Once I turned 19, I started to resort to my old behavior. That’s when I caught my first charge because my boyfriend was a drug dealer and I was a drug dealer’s girlfriend. I liked the lifestyle that came along with it — the fast cars, money, the clothes, the jewelry, all that.”

Davis ended up in prison for a year for selling drugs. She got out and had two more children. She’s back in prison serving the end of a 90-day sentence for driving a car without the consent of the owner.

“I’m here and pregnant again,” she says, smiling sheepishly.

“Yeah, I wanted another baby,” Davis says. “Because my daughter was two and I was like, you know, she’s getting so big on me. I wanted another little one.”

While she is locked up, Davis says her mother cares for her 2-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. Her 6-year-old son stays with his father.

“I don’t see them,” Davis says of her children, “because I’m only doing 90 days now, so I figured I’d hold off until I’m released. Then I’ll just spend time with them then. It’s too stressful for them to come up here and see me.”

Davis says she spends much of her time in prison pondering her future.

“It’s time for me to change. It’s definitely time to change. I want to be a better role model for my children, you know? I wanted to be a good mother. I can’t be a good mother from here, so….”

GINETTE FERSZT is an associate professor at the College of Nursing at the University of Rhode Island. For the last 10 years, using money from grants, she has provided psychiatric counseling to pregnant inmates and gathered research.

Often the women discuss depression, Ferszt says, and the “issues of loss while not having their babies,” as well as the difficulty some have bonding with their children when they get out. Many of the women have had such poor parental models there is little nurturing to draw on.

“There is a lot of criticism about these women. People ask why should they be having babies, their tubes should be tied, blah, blah, blah. Most of these women we have in prison come from very impoverished lives — poverty, poor education, poor support system –– so at a very young age they have to learn how to survive. If you’re a prostitute because you want to put food on the table, what’s wrong with this picture?”

Ferszt says the women don’t belong in prison. They belong in some form of transitional center where they can develop parenting skills, learn about nutrition and gain self-esteem.

“Society is not helping support a lot of this population from the minute they are born. Yet we’re expecting them to go out and live almost middle class lives. People say, ‘Well, why don’t they eat healthier? Eat more fish and fresh vegetables.’ It’s absurd. … They don’t have the money to buy fruits and vegetables.”

And there’s another problem. “I’ve heard from women repeatedly that they can’t find better housing because nobody wants to have an ex-inmate as a renter. …You spend one week living in an area where they live and see how well you survive. For many people, substances are a way of numbing their pains.”

DR. JENNIFER CLARKE understands Ferszt’s frustration.

An assistant professor of medicine in obstetrics and gynecology at Brown University, Clarke has worked with pregnant inmates for the last decade, providing not only primary care but prenatal and family planning services, too.

About 80 percent of the women who say they don’t want to get pregnant once they are released will begin using contraception while in prison. How many continue using birth control methods on the outside is unclear; Clarke is about to launch a study of that question.

What is clear is the psychological reasoning these women give for having babies: the incentive, finally, to turn their lives around and having someone to love them unconditionally.

In Rhode Island, about 56 percent of female offenders return to prison within one year, according to some of Clarke’s research. Many are drug addicts.

“The saddest comment I ever hear is, ‘Thank God I was arrested. It saved my life.’ And I hear that too frequently,” says Clarke. “A lot of women live in risky environments. For a woman to be homeless, there is not a safe environment for her. Relationships are unstable and often violent.”

What might surprise people about some of these expectant mothers, she says, “is how hurt and otherwise damaged the women have been. There are very few violent criminals who are incarcerated. Most of the women have just had very hard lives and made some bad choices.”

For inmates, being pregnant does require special care. Sometimes that means persuading prison staff to give them a second mattress for cushioning. And then there are always the hunger pangs. Prison mealtimes are regimented and the food is bland. But the women, unlike other inmates, are given an evening snack of cereal and milk.

Clarke says the prison’s food, while not popular, “doesn’t lack in calories or proteins.”

“One of the major problems we see is too much weight gain” from the expectant mothers. “Eighty to 90 percent were smoking before incarceration, and there is a forced abstinence there [in prison] that’s incredibly good for the health of the baby, but that also slows down the metabolism and leads to weight gain.”

Most of the women choose not to exercise, making it easier to gain weight.

“My feeling is good health care while incarcerated is good overall public health.” If the prison can provide these women with family planning, vaccinations against disease, diagnosis and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases “then there is less of a problem out there in the community.”

AS TIPPIT APPROACHED her due date in March, correctional officers took her to Women & Infants Hospital for routine checkups — first every two weeks, then once a week, then twice each week.

Tippit, with one infant already in foster care, struggled emotionally with having another baby while being locked up.

“I was worrying all the time: Is the baby going to be OK? Am I going to be able to get through this? I was afraid I wouldn’t see him. I was kind of scared to get close just because of the fact that I didn’t know if I was going to be connected to him.”

She was two weeks past her due date when, during her hospital visit on March 25, doctors decided to induce labor.

With two correctional officers stationed close by, Tippit delivered an 8-pound baby boy whom she named Landyn after a mentor of her mother’s.

“They gave him to me as soon as I had him,” Tippit says, beaming. “Then he got to stay with me in my room that whole night. They took him out of the room the next morning about 10 o’clock, but then I could go to the nursery and feed him and all that and change his diaper. The COs [correctional officers] were very nice, just kind of stayed out of the way, let me spend time with the baby.”

Tippit spent two days at the hospital before riding the van back to prison. Meanwhile, the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth & Families prepared to place her newborn in a foster home — 1 of 313 children in its care that week who had at least one parent behind bars.

“On the ride back from the hospital, all I could just keep thinking about was him. I just wanted to cry so bad. … Now I’m just afraid I won’t be able to give him all the financial support he needs and where it’s going to happen and will I be able to do it.”

Tippit had planned to turn over guardianship of Landyn to her mother, Shelby Muennink, who had come up from Oklahoma. The three would move back to Oklahoma City, once Tippit got released from prison. But that plan proved more difficult than anticipated.

TIPPIT WALKED OUT of prison on April 27. Two weeks later, she and her mother wait in a DCYF office in North Kingstown for a social worker to bring Landyn in for an hour visit.

Child-care officials intervene in cases such as Tippit’s in which past drug use and family support have been issues. A Family Court judge granted her one visit a week with her boy until final guardianship is determined.

“Every time I have to leave him it’s so hard,” she says.

Case worker Mike Lewis arrives carrying Landyn in an infant car seat. Tippit slips him out of the crocheted afghan that his foster family wrapped him in and holds him in a swaying embrace.

For the next hour Tippit dotes on her boy, preparing a bottle and taking pictures of him with her cell phone as her mother and her 4-year-old sister, Gage, take turns holding him.

Tippit tells Mike Lewis she’s frustrated by how long DCYF is taking to give Landyn to her mother.

Tippit allowed her first son, now 2, to be adopted “because he’s been with the people he’s with since he was born. It would just be selfish of me to take him back. He’s just so used to them and they are really nice people.” She wants to keep Landyn, she says, but for now her mother will have to serve as conduit.

“I know I did a lot of things wrong in my past, but that’s the past. I’ve changed. I’m ready. I guess they figure once you’re a screwup always a screwup. It’s not fair to my baby.”

Tiffany asks Lewis: if her mother establishes residency here will that speed the process along?

“I can’t answer that question,” says Lewis patiently.

“How can I get that question answered?” she asks.

“Why don’t you just enjoy your visit right now,” Lewis suggests.

“If we’re going to enjoy the visit, we need to discuss how I can get him back,” says Tippit.

“It’s the state’s responsibility to look after the baby’s interests,” Lewis explains.

“I don’t understand why the state wouldn’t want a child to be with his family that cares for him. I know no one is keeping my child, Mike.”

In a quiet moment on the couch, she whispers in her son’s ear: “I’m sorry.”

EPILOGUE: Weeks later, Landyn’s future remains uncertain.

His father is in the armed services and acts as though he doesn’t want anything to do with him, says Tippit’s mother. Muennink has returned to Oklahoma and says her husband is now having second thoughts about the baby staying with them.

Tippit hired a lawyer to try to get custody of Landyn. But Family Court officials want to first see her complete a six-month Drug Court program of monitoring and treatment. Tippit says her probation supervision has already been transferred to Oklahoma, where she wants to return.

“Hopefully,” she can enroll in a similar drug court program there, she says, “but I don’t know what’s up.”

On Wednesday, Tippit visited Landyn again at the DCYF office in North Kingstown.

The next day she headed home to Oklahoma — without her son.

tmooney@projo.com