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.