# Institution: Justice

*What the institution **does** about crime — the corrections and policing layer of the **Institution**
suite of RimWorld 1.6 mods.*

Vanilla RimWorld keeps a rap sheet no one reads. You capture a raider, warden them, and the game
promptly forgets they ever tried to knife a guard. Prisoners are interchangeable mood-boxes; a
"maximum security" wing is a decoration you build by hand and the sim never acknowledges. There is a
record, and there are no consequences.

**Justice turns the record into consequences, and closes the loop.** It grades every held pawn from
what they have actually done, gives the colony a *climate of order* that crime and punishment move,
feeds that climate back into every pawn's disposition, moves a *reform* score that decides whether a
sentence hardens or heals, gates release on it, and gives prisoners the recreation need vanilla flatly
denies them. The through-line is one sentence:

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

That is the difference between policing that *cleans up* and policing that **governs**. The reason to
punish an offender is not only this offender — it is the message it sends everyone else who is quietly
deciding, on a seeded roll, whether crime pays here.

---

## The one shared record

Justice never keeps its own per-pawn crime state. It reads and writes the single `CriminalRecord` that
**Institution: Core** holds for every pawn — the same record the search, the escape, the brewing, and
the gang systems write to. That is the whole point of the substrate: classification, deterrence,
discipline and parole all agree on how dangerous a pawn is, because they all read the same numbers.

| Field | What it counts | Written by |
|---|---|---|
| `crimesCommitted` | offences on the record | Justice (`RecordCrime`), Gangs (fights) |
| `escapeAttempts` | proven flight risk | Contraband (escape/tunnel) |
| `contrabandMade` | shivs, brews, tools made | Contraband |
| `timesSearched` | searches endured | Contraband (warden search) |
| `timesCaught` | searches that found something | Contraband |
| `lastCrimeTick` | when they last offended | Justice (`RecordCrime`) |
| `reform` | −1 hardened … +1 rehabilitated | Justice (`Discipline`, `Parole`) |
| `pardoned` | released after genuine reform | Justice (`Parole`) |

Justice authors the **crime / punishment / reform / pardon** columns; the counters of *what physically
happened* are fed by its siblings. It grades and gates over all of them.

---

## The six modules

| Module | What it does | Page |
|---|---|---|
| **Classification** | Grades held pawns `Minimum`..`Supermax` from a risk score over the record. | [Classification](Classification.md) |
| **Deterrence** | The colony's climate of order, moved by crime and punishment, drifting to baseline, read back into propensity. | [Deterrence](Deterrence.md) |
| **Discipline & Reform** | Punishment moves the reform score — harden vs. rehabilitate. The seat of institutionalization and recidivism. | [Discipline & Reform](Discipline-and-Reform.md) |
| **Parole** | Release when reform, grade, and pardon status line up. | [Parole](Parole.md) |
| **Rehabilitation** | The warden work that DRIVES the corrections arc: a rehabilitate mode + counselling sessions move reform and colony order, a parole alert + release job, and neglect that hardens. | [Rehabilitation](Rehabilitation.md) |
| **Regime** | Enables the prisoner recreation (Joy) need via a Harmony postfix, idempotent with Prisoner Recreation. | [Regime](Regime.md) |

Threaded through all six is one small piece of glue, **`JusticeBootstrap`**, which at load fills the
neutral deterrence seam Core leaves open — reconnecting the feedback loop across the mod boundary
without Core ever depending on Justice. See [Deterrence](Deterrence.md).

---

## Policing — the pre-arrest half (shipped)

Everything above is the **post-arrest** side — corrections. The **pre-arrest** side now ships too:
colonists commit crimes on the propensity spectrum, witnesses and a constable's work name the culprit,
and a weighed arrest can end in a cell or a resisted breakout — plus prison riots and a recidivism
alert. Deterrence models *the consequence of visible justice*; policing is the machinery that produces
crime to answer. It has its own settings toggle (on by default). Full detail in **[Policing](Policing.md)**.

---

## Requirements & load order

- **RimWorld 1.6**
- **Institution: Core** — required. The propensity/record engine Justice grades against.
- **Harmony** — required. Regime's prisoner-recreation patch is the suite's only Harmony-using code.
- Load **after** Core and Harmony.

Each mod in the suite stands alone as an install; together they form one system. Justice is useful
with Core alone, and richer with **Institution: Contraband** (which feeds the escape/search/contraband
counters) and **Institution: Gangs** (whose fights record crimes).

---

## The suite

Part of the **Institution** suite: **Core** (the propensity + record engine) · **Contraband**
(concealment, search, escape) · **Justice** (this mod) · **Gangs** (contraband economies). The
standalone **Foul Play** framework bridges into Core and Contraband when present.

---

*Part of the **Institution** suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs. Developed
with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).*