Back to the Start Intern Spotlight: Esther Melton

Meet Our Spring Intern: Esther Melton

by Juan Moreno Haines

This spring, Back to the Start welcomed Esther Melton as an intern supporting our narrative and policy work focused on disrupting the cradle-to-prison pipeline.

Esther is a fourth-year medical student from the Bay Area currently studying at University of California, San Francisco. She previously earned degrees in African American Studies and Human Biology from Stanford University, where she explored the intersections of health, racism, and intergenerational trauma.

Her passion for this work is both personal and professional. Coming from a family directly impacted by incarceration, mental illness, and addiction, Esther has spent much of her academic and volunteer work focused on underserved communities, including compassionate release advocacy, supportive housing healthcare access, and prison health research.

This spring, Esther also played an important role in our legislative work by helping review thousands of California bills that intersect with the cradle-to-prison pipeline. That research helped inform the policy analysis our incarcerated co-leads used to identify Back to the Start’s 2026 legislative priorities.

Soon, she will begin her anesthesiology residency at Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center before continuing her training at University of Pennsylvania. We’re grateful for the time, insight, and compassion she brought to Back to the Start during her internship.

What surprised you most about going inside San Quentin?

Prior to my internship with Back to the Start, I had shadowed a psychiatrist at the San Francisco County Jail and a pediatrician at the Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro. Although I understood the differences between jails and prisons, I wasn’t expecting such a drastic difference in their physical environments.

Walking through the holding cell at the front gate of San Quentin reminded me of walking through the anteroom separating the public hallway of UCSF Children’s Hospital from the isolated Bone Marrow Transplant Unit for very sick children. When I came out the other side, I was surprised to see people walking “freely” around a beautifully sunlit plaza with a central fountain.

I understood that the part of the prison I was exposed to as a visitor was not the same part I had heard about in the news or on podcasts — particularly the housing units. I found myself wondering what image was being upheld by allowing visitors to see a very specific part of the prison where, until the moment you leave and residents do not, you can almost forget you are in a space of confinement.

Was there a moment when you connected what you’ve learned academically to the stories you heard at Back to the Start?

Through my educational background, I’ve learned about epigenetics and the ways inequity and trauma can be passed from one generation to another. I’ve also studied the historical transformation of slavery into Jim Crow and mass incarceration.

While that education helped me understand the bigger picture of oppressive systems over time, the stories I’ve heard through Back to the Start brought me down to the individual level. They helped me see the real-life impact of those systems on a person’s life.

When participants share stories about generational trauma combined with unequal access to food, housing, healthcare, and education, you can clearly see the pipeline to incarceration. Through these stories, it becomes remarkably clear how earlier intervention or systems-level change could have completely transformed someone’s future.

You’ve just finished an internship that had you going inside a prison. How did you explain that to friends and family?

Actually, my father was incarcerated at San Quentin in the 1990s, and I know he felt some type of way about his only daughter voluntarily entering a place he never wanted to step back into.

Although he has always supported my interests and passions, he never fully understood why I wanted to work with people impacted by the carceral system, especially since he was incarcerated before I was born.

After several years of studying incarceration through academic work, I felt it was necessary to actually see and experience what it feels like to be inside. That’s what I shared with my friends and family.

By this point, my friends already knew that decarceration and prison abolition were passions of mine, so they were more curious than skeptical about my decision to work with Back to the Start.

Although my dad and I don’t always share the same views about the carceral system, I’m grateful that he and the rest of my family support me and recognize that working with people impacted by this unjust system is something I hope to do for a long time.

What do you wish more people understood about prisons and the people who live there?

I think people need to understand that our carceral system is deeply connected to this country’s history of enslaving Black people. Although slavery was technically abolished, the oppression of marginalized communities simply evolved into new systems.

Understanding that connection helped me realize that mass incarceration is not inevitable.

I also hope we can completely reshape what justice and rehabilitation look like so that people are not removed from society and forgotten. Prison often defines someone by the worst moment of their life, making it easy to forget everything that came before.

The people I met at San Quentin are, like all of us, products of their environments and the systems that shaped them. I’m incredibly grateful to have learned from them and to be reminded of our shared humanity.