institution/Wiki/justice/Home.md

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.

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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.

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The five modules

Module	What it does	Page
Classification	Grades held pawns Minimum..Supermax from a risk score over the record.	Classification
Deterrence	The colony's climate of order, moved by crime and punishment, drifting to baseline, read back into propensity.	Deterrence
Discipline & Reform	Punishment moves the reform score — harden vs. rehabilitate. The seat of institutionalization and recidivism.	Discipline & Reform
Parole	Release when reform, grade, and pardon status line up.	Parole
Regime	Enables the prisoner recreation (Joy) need via a Harmony postfix, idempotent with Prisoner Recreation.	Regime

Threaded through all five 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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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