By Smith
I’m not sure how useful it is to speculate on where Keith Raniere’s incarceration will happen. There’s a good chance Raniere will never be convicted.
On the one hand, Raniere has excellent council and it would be wrong to assume recent events will play much of a role in his defense. It’s very likely NXIVM adherents will be lining up to testify their actions were consensual and that will make the sex trafficking crimes tough to prosecute.
I believe prosecutors will have a much easier time with the money laundering charges, but – even then – he could end up on probation or in a white collar prison. All that seized evidence might do more to incriminate others than Raniere. He engaged in a lot of behaviors designed to disguise his actual role in the affairs of NXIVM. There’s a good chance he actually did insulate himself from prosecution and others are going to take the fall.
On the other hand, it doesn’t sound like Raniere is faring well in prison. One of the things I know is that pretrial detention is very hard on people. There’s a psychology to being incarcerated where one must give up hope of eventual release to accept their present surroundings. It does not sound like Raniere is anywhere close to making that turn.
Being detained for extended periods without being convicted does something to people, akin to a fugue state. The prisoner still believes there’s a chance of being restored to previous life circumstances while simultaneously embracing the despair all prisoners encounter over the loss of freedom and personal dignity. This dread builds over an extended period as prisoners try to reconcile those wildly competing worldviews, you just can’t imagine how important an internally-consistent worldview actually is.
The response to a perceived gap is often self-harm. It happens fast, like a switch. One day, you’re with someone who seems very optimistic about the future, the next, you find out that person checked out when no one was looking. While I don’t have any data to support this, it always seems like it’s the smart ones (or the ones who think they’re smart) who are the most vulnerable. I think they feel an immense sense of failure over not being able to convince others of their innocence and it just consumes them.
That’s why I say the odds of Raniere ever being convicted are slim. There’s a better chance his council gets the charges thrown out, or he does himself in, or both – offing himself after getting out and finding his little empire is gone and no one wants anything to do with him.
