OPINION & ORDER This opinion serves to memorialize the Court’s September 29, 2021 decision from the bench, (see Minute Entry dated Sept. 29, 2021), which DENIED Defendants’ partial motion to dismiss Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint, (ECF Nos. 155-56). I. BACKGROUND A. Facts For the purposes of the instant motion, I accept as true the facts, but not the conclusions, alleged in the Second Amended Complaint. (ECF No. 134 (“SAC”).) Plaintiffs, formerly incarcerated individuals with serious mental illness who are indigent, brought this lawsuit to challenge their institutionalization in New York State’s prison system and the subsequent failure of the state to provide community-based mental health housing and supportive services upon their release. Defendants include the New York State Office of Mental Health (“OMH”), Ann Marie T. Sullivan, in her official capacity as OMH Commissioner, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (“DOCCS”), Anthony Annucci, in his official capacity as the Acting Commissioner of DOCCS, and Anne Marie McGrath, in her official capacity as deputy director of DOCCS.1 Plaintiffs wish to represent three classes. The first is a “General Class” of people with serious mental illness whom Defendants hold in prison past their release dates — including their approved conditional release dates, open dates for parole release, and even the end of their prison sentences — due to the inadequate capacity of state community-based mental health housing programs. (SAC 5.) The second is an “RTF Subclass,” made up of General Class members who Defendants purport to have released to Residential Treatment Facilities (“RTFs”) upon the maximum expiration dates of their court-imposed prison sentences, but who in fact are held in prisons where they are treated just like prisoners.2 (Id.
6-7, 10.) The third proposed class is a “Discharge Class.” This group consists of “people with serious mental illness whom Defendants unnecessarily segregate or place at serious risk of institutionalization upon their release from prison because Defendants fail to provide the community-based mental health housing and supportive services that Plaintiffs need.” (Id. 13; see id. 698.) Discharge Class members are evaluated by Defendants and are determined to require and be eligible for community-based mental health housing and supportive services, (id. 14), but instead of providing the Discharge Class Plaintiffs with those services in that setting, Defendants rely on state-operated, segregated settings to deliver these services, or, alternatively, release these individuals to a hodgepodge of hotels, motels, homeless shelters, and shelter-like parole housing facilities that lack the essential services these individuals require, (id.
