The company that runs the Hope Village halfway house in Southeast D.C. is no longer seeking to extend or renew its contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a letter Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton sent to the BOP.

That could leave the District without a facility to help men who are finishing prison sentences secure jobs and housing before they are released.

The six-building facility in Southeast D.C. houses about 200 people, most of them finishing federal prison sentences and within six months of release. It opened in 1978, and the Washington Post reported that Hope Village Inc. has won more than $125 million in federal contracts since 2006.

A spokesperson for Norton told WAMU the company informed her office about its decision in an email. Hope Village has not responded to a request for comment.

“Hope Village’s current contract with the Bureau of Prisons expires on April 30, 2020,” the BOP wrote in a statement. “The BOP continues to explore options to provide Residential Reentry Center (RRC) services in the Washington DC area for the period following April 30th.”

The decision to not continue services comes after a long dispute over the federal contract for a men’s halfway house in the District. A nonprofit called CORE DC won a five-year, $60 million federal contract over Hope Village in 2018, but its efforts to open a halfway house stalled after it struggled to secure a location. Because CORE DC failed to find a location, the award was thrown into question, and both companies were ultimately given a chance to revise their proposals. Hope Village’s contract has been repeatedly extended in the interim, as the parties wait on a final decision from the BOP.

The most-recent contract extension expires on April 30, which means the city could be headed toward an outcome that many feared: No federal halfway house to help men transition from federal prison back to life in the city. It is not clear what would happen if Hope Village were to close without a replacement, but the Reentry Action Network, a coalition of nonprofits that serve people returning to D.C. from incarceration, has expressed that they would find it unacceptable if the BOP were to simply not award a contract for a D.C. halfway house. (The Reentry Action Network also endorsed CORE DC in the contract competition last year, citing the fact that the nonprofit promised to collaborate with service providers in the city, and men incarcerated at Hope Village have complained for years about a lack of programming.)

Norton expressed in a letter to the BOP on Friday that “it is essential that an RRC or similar entity in the District be provided during the coronavirus.” (RRC stands for residential reentry center, a term that is interchangeable with halfway house.)

The men incarcerated at Hope Village have joined advocates in criticizing the halfway house for its recent response to the coronavirus. A class action lawsuit brought by residents alleges that staff are not providing the men inside with adequate medical care, and are not doing enough to reduce crowding. Two people died at the facility within a three-day span this month, though the BOP says the deaths were not related to the virus.

The BOP, which conducted a site visit at Hope Village this week in response to a request from Norton, said the halfway house operator is in compliance with the agency’s coronavirus guidelines. The Bureau said in court documents that three people at Hope Village have been tested for COVID-19, and none have tested positive. One of the men whose test came back negative died on Sunday; A lawyer representing Hope Village told a judge this week that he went to the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms and then suddenly died after completing two weeks of quarantine back at Hope Village.

Local activists fear that men inside the facility are being put in harm’s way. This week, they drove by Hope Village in cars, demanding the immediate release of everyone inside in response to the pandemic. (The activists also drove by the D.C. Jail, the Fairview halfway house for women, and the mayor’s press conference that day.)

“It’s really unfortunate that they don’t let those folks go home to their families,” said Qiana Johnson, an advocate who leads the Prince George’s County organization Life After Release. “What they’re saying is that the human lives of the folks that are incarcerated don’t matter.”

In response to the spread of the coronavirus in federal facilities across the country, the BOP says it has been working to transfer men out of the facility and into home confinement. In a phone conference hearing Tuesday related to the class action lawsuit filed by Hope Village residents, an attorney representing the BOP said 13 people would be approved for release to home confinement on Tuesday, and an additional 30 to 40 people could be released over the course of the next week.

That still leaves about 150 men in the facility. Some are in the custody of the D.C. Department of Corrections, being held as they await trial. But the vast majority are finishing federal prison sentences. (Since D.C. does not have a prison of its own, people convicted of felonies in the city are funneled into the federal system.)

Johnny H. Walker III, an assistant U.S. attorney representing the BOP, told the judge in Tuesday’s hearing that it may not be possible to release a large number of men from the facility, because “a majority” of the 126 men eligible for release to home confinement “would be homeless if released from the facility right now.”

In her letter to Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal Friday, Norton asked the BOP what its plans were for housing D.C. residents returning home from prison, and where current Hope Village residents will be housed after the company’s contract expires on April 30.

Lastly, Norton asked, “How will residents be physically moved to a new location safely, especially in light of the coronavirus, which requires social distancing?”

This story was originally published on WAMU, and the headline has been updated to reflect that Hope Village is not D.C.’s only halfway house.