There’s a leadership change at the D.C. Department of Corrections — and it’s a familiar face taking over.

Mayor Muriel Bowser announced Friday that Tom Faust would take over the department’s top job on Jan. 24, returning to the post he held from 2011 to 2016. He’ll replace Quincy Booth, who became the department’s director in 2016 but will “now serve in an advisory role.”

Faust takes over the Department of Corrections — which has a $187 million budget and more than 1,300 employees — amidst increasing scrutiny over conditions at the aging D.C. Jail.

The jail houses roughly 1,500 people in two facilities, the Central Detention Facility and the Correctional Treatment Facility, and since the start of the pandemic, there have been concerns over how it  has managed COVID-19 protocols and outbreaks. In late December there was a surge of cases among residents and staff, promoting at least one lawmaker to ask that city officials do more to release people from custody. Earlier in the pandemic, the department was criticized for imposing a months-long, 23-hour-a-day lockdown as a means to tamp down on transmission of the virus.

There have also been broader criticisms  of how residents are treated and the conditions in which they live, prompted in part by the presence of 40  people being held on charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. After a federal judge raised concerns about the living standards of one defendant, an inspection by the U.S. Marshals found “evidence of systemic failures” and unacceptable living conditions, and ordered that 400 residents be transferred to a federal facility in Pennsylvania. (Conditions in the wing where the Jan. 6 defendants were being held, though, were found to have been acceptable.) D.C. then entered into an agreement with the U.S. Marshals to improve conditions, but last month D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine took the unusual step of announcing his office would not represent the department in further legal matters related to conditions at the jail.

However, there were more positive developments at the jail under Booth’s leadership, including the first-ever election of an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner to represent the jail’s residents, and the establishment of the Young Men Emerging program, which paired residents with longer sentences with younger offenders to provide programs ranging in scope from education to restorative justice.

Faust — who served as Arlington County sheriff and director of the National Sheriffs’ Association before coming to D.C. — was credited with making some improvements at the jail during his tenure, including paving the way for the city to reassume operations of the Correctional Treatment Facility from the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company, in 2017.

Still, Faust will face some of the same challenges that Booth did, namely that the jail is more than 40 years old and in need of replacement — though there are no set plans or funding in place to do so.