The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints practices plural marriage and is unconnected to the mainstream LDS church, which abandoned the practice in 1890. Warren Jeffs became its president and prophet in 2002 on the death of his father.
The control structure he inherited and intensified had one feature that made it more complete than almost anything else in this part of the guide: the prophet assigned marriages.
Marriage in FLDS doctrine is not a private arrangement. It is placement — the prophet, by revelation, determines who marries whom. He can also reassign: a man judged unworthy can have his wives and children transferred to another man, and this was done. Salvation itself was mediated through the prophet's approval.
Consider what that means for a member's incentives. A man who displeases the prophet loses his family, his standing in the community, his home if it is community-owned, and his eternal prospects. A woman who displeases the prophet is reassigned. This is coercive control in Evan Stark's sense — regulation of the intimate conditions of a person's life — scaled from a household to a community of thousands.
Information closure completed it. Television, internet and outside media were prohibited. Children were educated within the community. Contact with outsiders was restricted, and apostate relatives were cut off.
The consequence for children raised inside is the part that generalizes beyond this case. Chapter 8 described conformity to a false consensus in adults who could see the truth and chose not to say it. A child raised in a closed community is in a different position: the group's account is not a consensus they are conforming against their perception, it is the only account they have ever encountered. There is no baseline. Comparison information — the thing that lets a person recognize their situation as unusual — is what the closure is for.
The lost boys are the system's byproduct. Plural marriage requires a surplus of women, and the surplus is created by expelling adolescent males on disciplinary pretexts. Hundreds of teenage boys were put out of the community, without money, education or family contact.
Texas authorities raided the Yeshua Foundation's YFZ Ranch in April 2008. The removal of more than four hundred children was later found by the Texas Supreme Court to have been improperly broad, and most were returned — but evidence seized during the raid, including Jeffs's own audio recordings and records, supported prosecutions.
Jeffs was convicted in Texas in August 2011 of sexual assault of a child and aggravated sexual assault, involving girls aged twelve and fifteen, and sentenced to life plus twenty years. He has continued to issue directives to the church from prison.