# Institution: Policing

*The enforcement and order layer — the pre-arrest half of the law — of the **Institution** suite of
RimWorld 1.6 mods.*

Vanilla RimWorld keeps a rap sheet no one reads, and your own colonists never break the law. Policing
gives the colony a **climate of law and order** over the shared criminal record: colonists offend on a
seeded propensity spectrum, the law catches them, and catching one changes the disposition of the rest.

> **Catching and punishing one pawn changes the disposition of the rest.**

That is the difference between enforcement that *cleans up* and enforcement that **governs** — the
reason to punish an offender is the message it sends everyone else quietly deciding whether crime pays.

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## The pages

| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| **[Policing](Policing.md)** | Colony crime on the propensity spectrum, witnesses and the constable work type, the weighed arrest and resistance, prison riots, the recidivism alert. |
| **[Deterrence](Deterrence.md)** | The colony's climate of order (0 lawless … 1 iron), moved by crime and punishment, drifting to baseline, fed back into every pawn's disposition through Core's seam. |

At load, **`PolicingBootstrap`** fills the neutral deterrence seam Core leaves open — reconnecting the
feedback loop across the mod boundary without Core ever depending on the policing layer.

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## The one shared record

Policing keeps no per-pawn crime state of its own. It reads and writes the single `CriminalRecord` that
**Institution: Core** holds for every pawn — the same record Contraband, Corrections, and the gang
systems read. `RecordCrime` writes the `crimesCommitted` / `lastCrimeTick` columns; Corrections grades
and reforms over the same numbers.

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## Requirements & load order

- **RimWorld 1.6**
- **Institution: Core** — required (the propensity/record engine)
- **Harmony** — required
- Load **after** Core and Harmony.

The prison half — classification, discipline, reform, parole, regime — lives in **Institution:
Corrections**, which depends on this layer for the shared climate of order. A future **Judiciary** layer
(a court that tries and sentences) is reserved as a Core seam; today an arrest imprisons directly.

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*Part of the **Institution** suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Policing · Corrections · Gangs
· Ward. Split out of the former Institution: Justice.*