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 draws on the same shared systems — each colonist's propensity, the one shared criminal record, the climate of order — so policing is not a bolt-on: the record it writes is the record classification grades on and discipline reforms.
Crime — and why small colonies stay honest
Every ~40 seconds, each free colonist gets a hidden roll to offend. The base chance is low (about 6% per roll) and it is 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:
- 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 80% of the way to solved before anyone lifts a finger; an unseen one is a cold case worked from nothing.
Investigation then builds evidence toward a full, named solve two ways:
- Ambient progress, scaled by how many colonists the colony can spare — a background trickle from everyone keeping an eye out, faster when the colony has people to spare.
- The policing 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 call, and it goes ahead only when both are true: the colony can afford a prison, and the crime is serious enough to clear a bar that rises with how valuable the culprit is.
- 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. The bar sits at about 1.5 for an expendable pawn and climbs by three times the culprit's value — so a star colonist raises it to about 4.5.
- 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 (seeded by 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 — 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.
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: Policing, in the Institution suite.