The Deadly Logic of CARE Courts

By Mat Wahlstrom

We’ve been dealing with many attacks on our rights lately.

From above, the activist Supreme Court has gutted the right to privacy that underpinned the right to reproductive freedom as well as non-normative sexuality, allowed tax dollars to be transferred from secular public to private religious schools, and endorsed performative public prayer in the name of someone who specifically rejected making a show of praying in public (Matthew 6:5).

From Republicans, who almost universally support the January 6 insurrection, it’s the freedom to mass murder so long as it’s with bullets, and continued voter disenfranchisement.

But while these have been dominating headlines, we’ve lost sight of the single most dangerous one yet: the plan touted by state and local Democrats to create a separate legal system through what are perversely called “CARE Courts.”

An acronym for Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment, Senate Bill 1338 proposes a raft of policy and legislative changes allegedly to assist people living with mental health and substance abuse challenges. Championed by Governor Newsom and currently set for approval by the Legislature this week, if passed it will almost certainly be signed into law.

It involves an initial $65M for set-up costs and $49M each year after for enforcement, but $0 to address the already chronic shortage of therapists or suitable housing. (As it is, 57% of Californians are unable to access the behavioral health care they need, and California comes in 34th in state rankings on access to care.)

And it allows anyone from family members to first responders — including private “homeless outreach workers” — to petition for a court order.

Disability Rights California correctly points out several flaws with SB 1338. It does not mandate housing be provided, and would perpetuate institutional racism and widen health disparities. And the language of the statute is sloppy and imprecise, using terms not defined in the bill itself or in California law.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also joined in condemning SB 1338, as it will once again allow people to be medicated and institutionalized against their will, endangering the civil liberties of Californians living with disabilities, caught up in the criminal legal system, and/or experiencing houselessness.

In short, creating a different legal track for certain people by definition creates second-class citizens with diminished rights and protections relative to others.

One might think that these criticisms are based in the Law of Unintended Consequences. But taken together, it’s difficult if not impossible to see them as absolutely intentional.

Our problems with mental and physical disabilities and homelessness are the direct result of our electeds refusing to redress the lack of accessible health care and housing for everyone. And now they want to wash their hands of it by being allowed to replace our society of common weal with a polity of the competent, in which autonomy is tied to financial capacity — and devil take the hindmost.

And less anyone think this interpretation is alarmist, we have the experience of our neighbor to the north to show the consequences of following this deadly logic.

Bill C-7 recently amended Canada’s “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) program, their national version of California’s End of Life Option Act. It widened the criteria for allowing legal suicide beyond the strictly medical definitions of pain from terminal illnesses (from which death was “reasonably foreseeable”) to encompass those who feel diminished quality of life.

As predicted by many, this has led to outsized euthanasia of disabled and poor persons, who are pushed into thinking death is the only way to escape suffering from deliberate policy decisions that punish them. And next year, legislation will augment it further to include the mentally ill.

We already have problems with existing laws to protect the unhoused not being followed, from the city’s violating court orders on homeless enforcement to hospitals charged with dumping patients on the street. How can anyone expect there to be fewer problems with a system that enshrines their inequality? Or that when it fails by design, it wouldn’t be expanded to countenance eugenics?

Please, call 844-537-1657 to be auto-connected to your Assemblymember’s office and tell them to vote NO on SB 1338. The life you save may be your own.