institution/Wiki/justice/Policing.md

Policing — the pre-arrest half

The other half of the loop. Where the rest of Justice deals with people the colony has already caught, policing is what happens before the cell door: your own colonists commit crimes on the propensity spectrum, the colony investigates, and — sometimes — arrests.

It is a big behavioural change (your colonists become potential criminals), so it has its own toggle in the mod settings, on by default. Turn it off to run the rest of Justice — classification, deterrence, discipline, parole, regime — without colony crime.

---

The loop

[crime] → [witnessed / investigated] → [weighed arrest (resist?)] → prison → … → parole → [recidivism]

Every stage reads the shared engine (Propensity, the CriminalRecord, the deterrence meter), so policing is not a bolt-on — it feeds the same record classification grades on and discipline reforms.

Crime — and why small colonies stay honest

Every ~40 seconds, each free colonist gets a seeded roll to offend. The base rate is low (0.06) and multiplied hard by nature × nurture — almost nobody with an ordinary disposition ever does anything. But it is also multiplied by crime cover:

Free colonists	Crime cover
≤ 3	0.15
~8	~0.6
≥ 13	1.0

In a tight 2–3 pawn colony everyone knows everyone and retribution is certain even without a jail, so crime is rare; a larger, more anonymous colony offers cover. This is a deliberate inversion of the naive "no enforcement → more crime": a small colony is kept honest by its own closeness, not by a constable.

A crime is one of theft, vandalism, or assault — leaning on who the culprit is (a kleptomaniac steals, a bloodlusty pawn assaults, a pyromaniac vandalizes).

Consequences — the stakes

A crime leaves a mark the colony can see (all wrapped defensively — a consequence that finds no target never breaks anything):

• Theft lifts a small stack of the colony's goods and the thief pockets it. RimWorld has no per-person property (stockpiles are communal), so theft is theft from the common store — but the culprit now physically carries what they took, a natural evidence trail a search can pick up.
• Vandalism damages a nearby colony building.
• Assault gives a nearby colonist a light, down-safe knock — and the culprit chooses their mark wisely: someone they resent (motive), who is weak (little retribution), and unwatched (few witnesses).
• Relationships fray. An assault victim thinks much worse of their attacker immediately (they saw who did it); and when investigation names a culprit, the whole colony's opinion of them drops.
• The colony is notified a crime happened — culprit unknown.

Witnesses and investigation

A crime is not equally solvable. Colonists who were near enough to see it are witnesses, and each is a partial lead — a witnessed crime starts up to 0.8 of the way to solved before anyone lifts a finger; an unseen one is a cold case worked from nothing.

Investigation then accrues evidence toward 1.0 (naming the culprit) two ways:

• Ambient, scaled by how many colonists the colony can spare (~0.34 per check per unit of effort — a few investigated windows).
• The police work type. Assign a colonist to policing and they walk to open crime scenes and work them, adding a chunk of evidence scaled by their Intellectual + Social skill. A sharp constable cracks cases fast; a colony that spares no one lets them go cold.

The weighed arrest

A solved case does not mean an automatic arrest. Fellow-colonist cops will not gut the colony to jail someone over a petty crime — the arrest is a cost/benefit (ShouldArrest):

arrest  ⇔  colony can afford a prison  AND  severity ≥ 1.5 + value × 3

• Severity — the crime's kind (theft 1 · vandalism 1.5 · assault 2.5), escalated by the culprit's record (a rap sheet and prior escapes compound).
• Value — 0..1 from the culprit's best skills. A star colonist raises the bar to ~4.5; an expendable one leaves it at ~1.5.
• Capacity — below ~5 colonists, or with no prison bed, the colony arrests no one. A prisoner plus a warden would cripple a small colony. Capacity ramps up as the colony grows.

So a petty crime by your only doctor → they walk. A murder → arrested regardless. And a crime that paid, unanswered, erodes the climate of order a little more (crime emboldens).

Resisting arrest

The disposed do not go quietly (WouldResist, seeded nature × nurture):

• Comply → taken in cleanly (they become a prisoner of the colony — imprisonment is direct, and it survives guest-management mods like Hospitality).
• Resist → the violent turn berserk, the rest flee. A botched arrest becomes a crisis the colony must handle the hard way, and openly defying arrest emboldens the lawless.
• Subdued → a resister the colony beats down is then imprisoned (auto-capture) — the resist path resolves to a cell once the colony wins the confrontation. One who flees the map gets away.

Prison riots

When the climate of order collapses (deterrence at the floor) in a colony holding prisoners, a neglected prison boils over into a riot: disposed prisoners turn violent together, and the unrest shatters order further. A well-run colony (high deterrence) never sees one — a riot is the thing a badly-run institution earns. It ties the deterrence meter, the propensity engine, and the prison population into one emergent event.

Recidivism, made visible

The loop closes on itself: a pawn hardened in prison (negative reform) runs a higher propensity and reoffends. When investigation names a culprit the colony had paroled, it says so out loud — the recidivism loop turning in the open, the payoff for everything classification, discipline, and parole did upstream.

---

Part of Institution: Justice, in the Institution suite. AI disclosure: developed with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).