I have heard several times here at EVC that there are more Christians in prison as a percentage of the population than atheists. I did a little investigation and while I don't fully trust either of these websites I think there are some valid points made.
This site is the one which talks about the 0.209% of prisoners being atheists
Page Not Found - HolySmoke! .
There is another website which is a rebuttal of these statistics
Homepage - adherents .
The first website doesn’t have much to say except that 0.209% of prisoners reported being atheist in 1997 while 8 — 16% of the population is atheist. I expect that this is where the statistic originated.
The second site indicates that some of those numbers may be a bit misreported. They say that about 9.5% of the population is atheist/agnostic/nonreligious, which is consistent with the numbers above but the prison data has approximately 20% of the prison population not saying anything about their religious affiliation. Should these people be counted as nonreligious? Does it seem reasonable that people with strong religious convictions would be more likely to answer a question about their beliefs than someone who was ambivalent? It seems to me likely that you would find more atheists in that nonreporting populous than religious people.
quote:
from Homepage - adherents
In the federal prisoner statistics, a full 20% of the respondents either answered "none" or provided no response to the question on religious affiliation. Based on response patterns to similar questions on nationwide surveys, it is likely that all or nearly all of these persons would be in the "nonreligious" category (or the "atheists" category, to use the terminology from the atheist web page itself). Even without adding the ".209%" of the population that specifically identified themselves as atheists, the segment of the prison population which self-identifies as non-religious is approximately twice as large as found in the general population. (the bold text was on the webpage)
The webpage has more information but in the interest of brevity I won’t detail all of it.
I don’t doubt that people with religious affiliations commit crimes at the same rate as nonreligious/atheists. I’m just not convinced that they are more likely to be involved in crime. If someone has better sources please provide them.
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