In January, a California law will go into effect expanding Governor Gavin Newsom’s abysmal response to the state’s homelessness crisis: mental health court or the Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Court program.
Pitched by Newsom as an empathetic solution, the program has been described by those who have worked within it as an utter failure. Even more damning, the legislation has dramatically undershot the number of people Newsom claimed it would help.
California's CARE Court is a program launched to help adults with severe, untreated psychotic disorders like schizophrenia avoid homelessness, jail, or conservatorship by mandating 'community-based' treatment plans. Eligible individuals would be petitioned into court by family, clinicians, or officials, where a judge would approve tailored services like medication, housing support, and case management for up to two years with regular reviews. As opposed to criminal charges, CARE Court emphasizes early intervention without jail time.
Originally, CARE was pitched as the solution to the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles and San Francisco, once beautiful cities which combined now suffer from more than 50,000 homeless people, a vast majority of whom are addicted to drugs, mentally ill, or both.
“There’s no compassion with people with their clothes off defecating and urinating in the middle of the streets, screaming and talking to themselves,” Newsom said in 2022. “I’m increasingly outraged by what’s going on in the streets. I’m disgusted with it.”
Since 2023, CARE has cost California taxpayers $328 million, yet has produced just 684 so-called “treatment agreements”—all of them voluntary and unenforceable—and only 22 court-ordered treatment plans. State officials initially estimated the program would serve between 7,000 and 12,000 people.
As of October, California courts had received only 3,092 petitions, the vast majority of which were dismissed.
“I look at it as a total failure,” Anita Fisher, a former CARE court advocate whose son suffers from severe mental illness, said.
Not only is the program set to expand next year, but the range of mental health conditions that qualify someone for CARE will expand as well. This comes even as the Assembly Judiciary Committee has labeled the program “very expensive,” estimating that in 2024, CARE cost taxpayers roughly $713,000 per participant.
That price tag accompanies a zero percent success rate in places like Los Angeles, an outcome officials have attempted to excuse by pointing to the program’s novelty and slow implementation. Newsom's office took to blaming the program's failure on individual counties, not the program itself.
“Coercion rarely works with those who need care: Oftentimes these participants have been in and out of the criminal justice system and threatened with jail if they didn’t seek or succeed in treatment, which has not provided them with the stability they need,” Newsom’s spokesperson said in a statement. “The public has called for action and counties should be listening and acting with urgency — or voters will do it for them. There’s no excuse for counties failing to deliver — and the variability in implementation that we are seeing now is completely unacceptable.”
At minimum, CARE exposes a staggering level of waste, incompetence, and mismanagement at the heart of California’s homelessness response and state government. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into a program that delivers little more than some paperwork, excuses, and failure.
But the failure raises a more troubling question. If this much money can be openly squandered under the banner of compassion, with virtually no measurable results, how much more wasted money and fraud remains undiscovered?
Minnesota’s child care and Medicaid scandals showed how easily loosely supervised social programs can be exploited for years before anyone intervenes. California’s homelessness bureaucracy (on top of several other wasteful programs) is larger, better funded, and far less transparent.
If investigators ever apply the same scrutiny here, they may find fraud that could dwarf what was discovered in Minnesota.
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