Abstract
California has battled crime and mental illness in many ways for decades. There has been major legislation to remove services, provide services, deinstitutionalize state hospitals, and attempt to reduce prison and jail populations. Though all of these changes, California adopted a concept called collaborative courts. Collaborative courts are specialized courts that aim to combine judicial supervision with rehabilitation services in the community rather than someone being in jail or prison. California has taken models from other states and modified them to fits the needs of our local courts and built on these models to create new collaborative courts along the way. My thesis focused on assessing the data available to determine the outcomes of using collaborative courts. I reached out to both the Judicial Council and individual courts for data about collaborative court development, implementation, and recidivism rates but did not find the necessary information. Although some courts had begun collecting data, the information was outdated. I relied heavily on independent reports about different collaborate courts throughout California to reach my conclusions about what data management systems might work, and to highlight what information was lacking. This research led me to recommend that the Judicial Council should adopt a data driven model with specified characteristics going forward to track the progress of collaborative courts.