What is going on with C.A.R.E. Court? Is it really helping the homeless? Does it work?

Nov 25,2025

Transcript

Fred Roggin 0:00
Care court in California was set up to help the homeless, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Walter Clark joins us now to talk about it. Okay, Walter, thank you for coming on tonight. What is the problem with this care Court program that was supposed to fix the homeless crisis?

Walter Clark 0:17
The whole thing is so incredibly frustrating. I have to say, I’ve had extensive personal experience with this, and it’s depressing. We need to understand the fact of the matter is, the majority of people on the street are mentally ill, and they have associated drug dependency problems that has been compounded historically with those from the veterans from Vietnam who made up a large portion of the people on the street, but at the same time sex, 70% or so of the people on the street have schizophrenia. They are mentally ill, and they have drug and addiction problem, and they don’t have any economic means to get out of it. The hospitals closed, and the community care stuff just didn’t work out, and we ended up not having mandatory facilities. That’s that’s the problem. Voluntary programs do not work. The Care court is an example of attempting to make progress on this subject, but it’s still voluntary, and I’ve had experience of of trying to get a petition credit, and to do that, I had to get the homeless individual to cooperate, to get mentally examined, get a psychiatrist to say he was, in fact, schizophrenic, and to take that information apply in A petition to the court to get the Court’s authority to do something. What do they do? They say, you can go to this meeting. You can go to this program. Of course, the drug addicted, mentally ill person won’t do that. They do not voluntarily take their medicine. So the whole thing is laughable. I just, I’ve seen it firsthand. It doesn’t work, unfortunately. All right,

Fred Roggin 2:06
so I think you pretty much summed it up. But what do you think needs to be done here?

Walter Clark 2:10
Well, what they’ve tried to do again is something that is not going to work because it doesn’t have any teeth in it. The proposal I would have is to, we have to put money into hospitals to take care of these people. We have to have a system, a compromise system, which allows courts to order them to do something that they don’t want to do. The only state hospital we have anymore is for the criminally insane, and that’s patent State Hospital, and even that one has a 90 day waiting list to get into it, and Meantime, people just stay in jail. Unfortunately, our jails and our streets continue to be the homes of the mentally ill, and when somebody is arrested for petty theft or trespassing, they can be sentenced to jail, but the jails don’t want them. They immediately release them. So this is not just an eyesore, it’s not just irritating people see homeless people. It is a serious problem, and I really hope that we can address it with something so a lot more aggressive than providing community service programs for these people. All

Fred Roggin 3:18
right, Walter, great stuff. Thanks for coming on tonight.

Walter Clark 3:22
Delighted as always, to be with you, Fred. Thank you for asking the question. Well.