... Power Inside Principles ... Through our initial conversations with women in jail, we developed founding principles to guide our program priorities. In the most basic sense, we believe that women have human rights that include safety, dignity and justice. We witnessed the denial of human rights both inside correctional facilities and in communities created by oppression based on race, class, gender, ability, and sexual orientation. This oppression is reinforced by violence. The majority of the women we meet are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and/or child abuse. In addition to abuse, police brutality and sexual exploitation, forced sterilization, medical neglect, mass incarceration, and denial of access to food and shelter, are included in our definition of violence and denial of human rights. The way gender-based violence and structural oppression impacted women individually seemed to implicate how many came to be institutionalized and criminalized. We see women who are largely criminalized for health and social issues such as drug addiction, mental illness, homelessness, or self-defense in domestic violence. While society surveils or incarcerates women for health issues, there is little access to services that would help women actually overcome these problems. Therefore, we discovered that we needed not only to provide tangible resources to women and expand their ability to access those resources—but most importantly—we also needed to accomplish this with an awareness of the way in which economic and social marginalization plays out in their lives personally and collectively. Therefore, Power Inside frames its services as a health and human rights response to women’s oppression and sees the criminal justice system as merely the physical and theoretical locality of our work.