CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2022, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“NEWSOM’S CARE COURTS: WHY DID THIS
TAKE SO LONG?”
Anyone
who has volunteered at homeless shelters, handing out bananas, sleeping bags
and more to unhoused individuals bused in from surrounding areas, knows the
CARE courts due to begin operating early next year in seven California counties
are long overdue.
Volunteers
and anyone else engaging the homeless know a combination of drug or alcohol
addicts, mentally ill persons and veterans or ex-convicts with post-traumatic
stress disorder make up a majority of the unhoused in every part of California.
Put them
in so-called “permanent supportive housing” and many get into physical fights
with fellow residents and are then kicked out. That’s one reason why, despite
thousands of new tiny homes, former hotel rooms and other units opening up for
the unhoused over the last five years, homeless numbers remain almost stable.
The
simple reality is that mentally and emotionally healthy folks unhoused because
they are short of rent money are a minority in this populace. So are newcomers
from other states with much colder weather.
Before
the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals of all these kinds turned up for years at
overnight facilities offering shelter from winter weather, some jabbering
incoherently and others completely articulate as they explained their plight. Many
obviously needed psychiatric care and appropriate medication, while others
could profit from job training or counseling. Shelters usually offered none of
that.
There
have long been some unhoused who reject any help, preferring life on the
streets regardless of surrounding conditions, suspicious of anyone trying to
assist them and seeking to evade all rules and restrictions. Plus, a criminal
element preys on fellow homeless and on surrounding neighborhoods, most
commonly stealing anything they find that can be sold off, from expensive
bicycles to catalytic converters containing precious metals.
All these
categories are filled with folks who could benefit from help, but have not
accepted that idea. Since a series of legal decisions in the 1960s all but
outlawed forcible commitments to mental facilities, there have been few ways to
compel assistance for any adult.
That may
change a bit now, unless lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and
others derail Newsom’s new CARE courts. His Community Assistance, Recovery and
Empowerment Act (CARE), aims not to commit anyone or set up conservatorships,
but rather to see courts compel those who need it to get help. The homeless can
refer themselves to CARE courts under this new law, which starts in Glenn,
Orange, Riverside, San Diego, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and San Francisco counties
next year and goes statewide in 2024.
Or they
can be referred by families, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers and
others with whom they interact. They also can still refuse to participate.
But once
evaluated by a CARE court, they will undergo mental health and addiction
treatment and receive supervised housing. There is no prison involved, no
confinement. Just two years of shelter, a clinical team, a lawyer and a
volunteer supporter with whom they can converse regularly.
Newsom
calls this “a new path forward for thousands of struggling Californians and
empowering their loved ones to help. We must make it work.”
But many
civil rights and disability rights organizations disagree vehemently. The new
system, said a letter okayed by many such groups, “will only lead to
institutionalization and criminalization of those already isolated on the
streets.”
If all
this sounds a bit confused, it is. Any homeless person who insists on the
status quo can keep it, staying in tent villages periodically razed by local
authorities, the residents usually moving to other sites nearby.
But
families of many homeless want this program to go forward. “I worry every day
about my son,” said one 77-year-old retiree in Los Angeles with a bipolar
48-year-old son living on the streets. “I may know where he is one day, but the
next I can’t find him. It makes me crazy.”
The real
question here is why some organizations claiming to help the homeless don’t
want to give this new program a chance to prove itself.
For sure,
something must be done for the homeless, or this current cancer on American society
will live on indefinitely. CARE courts may start out seeming clumsy, but also
might evolve into something that liberates unhoused people, rather than
essentially condemning them to their present poverty and insecurity.
-30-
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now
available in an updated third edition. Email him at tdelias@aol.com .
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