[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] When Gavin Newsom launched CARE Court with great fanfare, he promised help for people with severe mental illness who go back and forth between homelessness, jail, and emergency rooms.
The California Governor boasted that CARE Court would be a 'completely new paradigm' that would compassionately force people's mentally ill loved ones off the streets and into treatment via a judge's order – and estimated that up to 12,000 people could be helped.
A State Assembly analysis said up to 50,000 people might be eligible.
However after spending $236 million in taxpayer dollars on CARE Court since the March 2022 announcement, the Daily Mail can reveal that the program has flopped, with some critics even saying it's fraud.
Only 22 people have been court-ordered into treatment so far.
Out of roughly 3000 petitions filed by October statewide, 706 were approved but of those, 684 were voluntary agreements that were never the intended point of the program.
When the plan was first announced, Ronda Deplazes, 62, and her husband, who had often been prisoners in their home in Concord since their son's schizophrenia diagnosis 20 years ago, CARE Court looked finally to be a solution to her entire family's heartbreak.
Her son developed schizophrenia in his late teens, she said. At first, the family believed his struggles were primarily addiction-related.
Like many families in California, they believed CARE Court would finally allow a judge to order treatment for someone too sick to recognize they needed help.
California's homeless population has hovered between 170,000 and 180,000 in recent years.
Between 30 and 60 percent of them are thought to have serious mental illness and many of those have substance abuse issues, according to both state and federal data.
Celebrity parents like the late Rob and Michele Reiner, allegedly murdered by their long-troubled son Nick, or the parents of former Nickelodeon child star Tylor Chase, who has been living on the streets of Riverside and resisting efforts to help him, faced the same often insurmountable challenges as Deplazes and other families when trying to rescue and aid their children.
For the past 60 years, ever since the passage of the bipartisan Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan and led to the end of involuntary confinement in state mental hospitals – lawmakers and mental health advocates have struggled to find solutions for the chronically mentally ill in the state.
But when Deplazes heard Newsom talk about CARE court, she felt he understood what she and other parents of mentally ill offspring go through.
'I've got four kids,' Newsom said at the time. 'I can't imagine how hard this is. It breaks your heart.
'I mean, your life just torn asunder because you're desperately trying to reach someone you love and you watch them suffer and you watch a system that consistently lets you down and lets them down.'
For years, Ronda's now 38-year-old son – who often went off his meds and used street drugs instead – acted out violently, sometimes throwing rocks at his parents' house and frightening the neighbors.
'He never slept. He was destructive in our home, said Deplazes, who asked that her son's first name be kept confidential. 'We had to physically have him removed by police.'
Once homeless, his condition worsened. Deplazes described finding him barefoot and almost naked in freezing temperatures, or screaming through the neighborhood in the middle of the night.
'They left him out on our street picking imagined bugs off his body,' she said. 'It was terrible.'
Deplazes estimates that her son has been jailed roughly 200 times, mostly for misdemeanors.
But after petitioning CARE court, a red tape-filled process that Deplazes was familiar with after years of trying to navigate the state's bloated, multi-billion dollar labyrinth of other programs for the homeless and mentally ill, a judge turned her down.
'He said, "his needs are higher than we provide for", Deplazes recalled.
'He said this even though the CARE court program specifically says if your loved one is jailed all the time, that's a reason to petition. That's a lie.
'They did nothing to help us. There was no direction. No place to go. They wouldn't tell us where to get that higher level of care.'
The emotional toll, she said, was horrific.
'I was devastated. Completely out of hope,' Deplazes said.
'It felt like just another round of hope and defeat.'
Deplazes, who keeps in touch with a network of similarly-stressed mothers of mentally ill children, alleges CARE Court has become a revenue-generating system that keeps cases open without delivering care.
California has spent between $24 and $37 billion on the homelessness problem since Governor Newsom took office in 2019 with dubious results although the governor's office frequently cites recent preliminary stats from 2025 showing a nine percent decrease in what is called unsheltered homelessness.
'There are all these teams, public defenders, administrators, care teams, judges, bailiffs, sitting in court every week,' Deplazes said.
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