So I'm not sure if any mods could do this, and if they can which mod that would be, but I have a few sims in my neighborhood that, for story reasons, I would like to not roam around the city. These are housebound sims, patients, prisoners, etc. Is there any way I can keep them locked up on their home lot when I have another family active?

I tried locking the doors in their home lot, but then they appear elsewhere, and when I make them the active household again I have to unlock the building to let them back in, so that certainly doesn't work. I've tried stopping the push scenarios in the story progression mod, but they still appear on community lots.

I'm assuming if this is possible i will have to do something with a user-created caste in story progression, but I have no idea what the settings would be. Does anyone have any ideas about what I can do to keep these sims locked up in their homes?

I'm afraid you can't really do this in TS3. The SP push settings gate what SP itself can do with the sims, but they will still go to work/school (unless they have no rabbithole careers/schools to go to) and the game itself will push them out of their homes to help populate community lots whenever it feels like it. I expect if you put them on a lot with no way out or to get to the rest of the town, the game will teleport them around. We can put sims in Stasis, that stops their progression and keeps their motives maxed out at 100% all of the time, but even then they won't stay locked in their homes and they become really boring to be around because they have no needs that require being met.

What you could do is use the Traveler mod to travel and move these sims to a different connected world then transition active play back to your original homeworld, thus leaving the sims deposited elsewhere in suspended animation. But it doesn't really sound like that is the solution you were looking for here.

Yeah, sending them to another world isn't really what I'm looking for. I still want to play these sims (I rotate a lot), I just don't want some random prisoner in full on prison jumpsuit showing up at the dance club, lol. Plus, I don't think I have any of the expansions that I would need to send them to another world (I've got Pets, Gen., NL, Amb., and Seasons).

You got me thinking, though. Would it be possible to use a mod like traveler to click of them and send them to a different lot? I don't care about them roaming so much as bumping into my active sims specifically. Last time I ran into one I tried to reset the housebound sim, but then they came straight back to the club. If anything I just want to be able to send these sims away from my active sims so they don't mess up my storytelling immersion.

This is going in the wrong direction then, but no. Traveler is for inter-world travel and moves, not in-world. It arranges a series of connected world nhd files within the same ongoing game in the same way that WA and Uni do, but there are no EP requirements to use it. You just need other worlds installed.

Okay, how about a compromise solution more along the lines you were asking about. Create a Manual caste called Prisoner (or whatever you wish), so Caste Automatic = False, and put your desired sims or households into this caste. Set the Lot Options for each community lot you do not want these sims pushed to include Caste: Disallow for the Prisoner caste. Then SP should not be pushing sims to these lots and if they show up anyway, they should leave on their own pretty quickly. The GoHere mod is required to be in play for this structure to be honored. I think you're going to be playing Whack-a-Mole for a while (figuratively) with the Lot Options though until you lock enough of them down.

Alternatively you could fence off each of these lots and use GoHere's customizable locking system on doors, gates, and archways to keep the caste members out. That seems like more work to me, but it depends on the lots in question.

Neither one will keep these sims from roaming around town, but that should in theory at least keep them out of dance clubs, parks, and other places you can control this way.

Oh that idea is perfect! Thank you so much!