Discipline & Reform

Punishment as an action, with a self-complete payoff — and the seat of institutionalization.

This page is the maths — what a disciplinary act does to reform and order. What drives it in play (a warden's rehabilitation sessions, and neglect that hardens) is Rehabilitation.

Punishment in Justice does two things at once, on two different axes:

It deters the colony. Order seen to be done raises the climate of order for everyone — RecordPunishment, +0.12. See Deterrence.
It reshapes the punished. A harsh hand prisonizes — the pawn hardens, reform falls, their disposition climbs for good. A corrective hand rehabilitates — reform rises, their disposition cools for good.

Both effects are Justice's own, so discipline is never inert. Prisoner Realism owns the passive toll of isolation (a good sim of how solitary feels); Justice owns the order it produces and the persistent shift it leaves on the pawn. When both mods are present, PR's solitary deterioration deepens the felt experience on top — it does not replace this.

The two hands

Discipline.Punish(pawn, harsh):
    Justice.RecordPunishment(pawn.Map)                       // +0.12 colony climate (Deterrence)
    reform = Clamp(reform + (harsh ? -0.15 : +0.10), -1, +1) // the persistent shift

Call	Reform delta	Meaning
`Punish(pawn, harsh: true)`	−0.15	Beatings, deprivation, the hard hand. Hardens — "prisonization."
`Punish(pawn, harsh: false)`	+0.10	Correction, structure, rewarded good conduct. Rehabilitates.

reform lives on the shared record, clamped to [−1, +1]:

`reform`	Reading
`+1.0`	Fully rehabilitated
`0.0`	Untouched — as they came in
`−1.0`	Fully hardened, institutionalized

Note the asymmetry the other way from Deterrence: harsh (−0.15) moves faster than gentle (+0.10). It takes three corrective acts to build +0.30 of reform; two harsh acts to tear down −0.30. Damage is quicker than repair — as it should be.

How reform becomes disposition

Reform is not a status effect or a mood buff. It is read straight back into Propensity.Nurture (in Core), where it multiplies a pawn's whole disposition:

if reform != 0:
    Nurture *= Clamp(1 - reform * 0.5, 0.4, 2)

`reform`	Nurture factor	Effect
−1.00 (hardened)	1.500	+50% more disposed — permanently
−0.30	1.150	+15%
−0.15 (one harsh act)	1.075	+7.5%
0.00	1.000	untouched
+0.10 (one gentle act)	0.950	−5%
+0.30 (parole threshold)	0.850	−15%
+1.00 (rehabilitated)	0.500	−50% less disposed — permanently

Given reform is clamped to [−1, +1], the factor spans 0.5× to 1.5×; the 0.4/2 clamp is a safety rail that reform alone never reaches. This is the whole trick. Institutionalization and recidivism are not a parallel mechanic bolted on the side — they are one number the propensity engine already reads. A hardened pawn is not flagged "recidivist"; they simply carry a −reform that makes every "would they?" roll for the rest of their life come up hot. Discipline and Parole are what move reform; Nurture only reads it — which is how institutionalization becomes Justice's without a second system.

Worked example — two sentences

Take a fresh prisoner, reform = 0, badly kept: mood 0.30, held. From Core, before reform, their Nurture is already 1 × 1.6 (mood) × 1.4 (held & unhappy) = 2.24, and say the colony sits at baseline so DeterrenceFactor = 1.05, giving Nurture ≈ 2.35.

The hard hand. You beat them into line — three harsh punishments:

reform: 0 → -0.15 → -0.30 → -0.45
Nurture factor at reform -0.45 = 1 - (-0.45 * 0.5) = 1.225

Their disposition is now 2.35 × 1.225 ≈ 2.88 — +22% hotter than when they arrived, forever, independent of mood. You have made them more criminal, not less. This is prisonization: the sentence itself became the cause. (You did buy +0.36 of colony climate along the way — order today, at the cost of the pawn's tomorrow.)

The corrective hand. Instead you structure and reward — three gentle punishments and you fix their conditions (recreation, decent cell) so mood recovers to 0.55:

reform: 0 → +0.10 → +0.20 → +0.30
mood 0.55 → no mood multiplier, not held-&-unhappy → those factors drop out
Nurture factor at reform +0.30 = 1 - (0.30 * 0.5) = 0.85

Now Nurture is roughly 1 × 0.85 × 1.05 (deterrence) ≈ 0.89 — below neutral. The same pawn who would have been 2.88 disposed is now 0.89. And at reform = 0.30 with a low enough grade they have crossed the Parole threshold. Same institution, opposite outcomes — decided by which hand you used.

How to play with discipline

Harsh is a lever, not a punishment button. It buys colony order now (+0.12 climate) at the price of the pawn's disposition forever (−0.15 reform → hotter Nurture). Use it when you need the deterrence and never intend to release the pawn — a Supermax lifer you are only ever going to hold.
Gentle is how anyone gets out. Parole needs reform ≥ 0.30; only the corrective hand builds it. Three gentle acts is the floor.
Damage compounds; repair is slow. −0.15 vs +0.10 means a pawn you brutalize early is expensive to bring back — and a hardened pawn commits more crime, which sinks the climate, which makes everyone worse. Don't harden pawns you might want later.
Conditions and discipline stack. Reform shifts disposition permanently; mood, neglect and deterrence shift it live (see Regime and Deterrence). A reformed pawn in a well-run wing is calm on two axes at once.

For modders

Discipline.Punish(pawn, harsh: true);   // -0.15 reform, +0.12 climate
Discipline.Punish(pawn, harsh: false);  // +0.10 reform, +0.12 climate

Punish uses GameComponent_CriminalRecords.For (creates the record if absent) and clamps reform to [−1, +1]. It always fires RecordPunishment on the pawn's map, so any act of discipline moves the colony climate regardless of which hand you use — the colony sees order done, whoever it was done to. The class lives in the Contraband namespace (shared since the extraction from Contraband).

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

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