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This popularly referenced survey gives statistics about the number of atheists in US prisons.

It suggests just 0.21% of the prison population is atheist. There are more scientologists! This is surprising because atheists represent about 15% of the US population.

Now, this survey is often used to show that atheists are more moral. (I lean towards this idea, being an atheist myself.) However, I have been told that such a survey is useless - many "closet" atheists would be worried about reprisal from checking the "atheist" box, especially in a predominantly Christian environment. This would tend to bias the results.

Has any research been performed about this?

Oddthinking
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Thomas O
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    Keep in mind the dynamic that prisoners "convert" to Christianity to appear reformed. – iterationx May 10 '11 at 20:26
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    If there is a concern about "being Christian", why would over 7% report as Muslim, while the US population of Muslims is only 0.8% (According to Pew)? Although interesting question. My friend is atheist and he has noted this study to me in the past, and I am interested in knowing how accurate his argument is. – JasonR May 10 '11 at 20:42
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    And the possibility that a significant percentage of inmates might not even know the word "atheism" and what it means. – quentin-starin May 10 '11 at 20:43
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    I fail to see how this would show that atheists are more moral. Becoming an atheist doesn't change your morality! I think this correlation should be read the other way, if true. Moral persons tend to be atheists. – Sklivvz May 10 '11 at 21:28
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    I remember we found a problem with this study on Atheism.SE, but I can't remember what it was. – Borror0 May 10 '11 at 22:04
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    Sklivvz nailed it. Without religion to poison your worldview against anyone different than you, I think it leads to the more humanist type of behaviour. @iterationx, I believe the numbers are for inmates checking in [needs citation]. @qes, that MAY be one case, but by that same token, they probably wouldn't BE atheist. ;) Although both of you bring up good points as to why this should be looked at more closely. (And yes Brightblades, this is the same one I showed you.) – Larian LeQuella May 10 '11 at 22:57
  • @Borror0 The problem was that there is no other record of this statistic, and that other statistics that area available show completely different numbers, but have problems of their own. – Konrad Rudolph May 11 '11 at 11:57
  • @Larian: Note that only the first user stated with @ in a comment is notified. If you want to address more than one person with notification you need to split it into two comments. However, the author of the parent post is always notified. – Martin Scharrer May 11 '11 at 13:05
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    @Martin Scharrer: Ah, didn't know that small technical detail (I am still a little new to StackExchange). Thank you. :) – Larian LeQuella May 11 '11 at 22:10
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    @Borror0, in the context of Atheism.SE there were a whole slew of this type of "us, them & statistics" questions which were of dubious value, at best (IMHO) – Benjol May 16 '11 at 11:46
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    I bet there's a correlation more with the particular religions and the socio-economic backgrounds of the prisoners. Atheists tend to be more highly educated, which is usually partly due to them coming from better economic demographics. In otherwords, prisons tend to be populated with people that tend to come from poor backgrounds, which also tend to be more highly religious. – DA01 Aug 29 '11 at 21:43
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    Am I the only one that thinks that 15% of the USA is Athiest needs a citation? Gallup has a poll they have run and it appears that Athiest comes in at about 5%. http://redcresearch.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RED-C-press-release-Religion-and-Atheism-25-7-12.pdf – user1873 Aug 19 '12 at 07:36
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    Without religion to poison your worldview against anyone different than you, I think it leads to the more humanist type of behaviour - that's speculation. Correlation does not mean there's causation, in this case between atheism and not getting convicted. As @DA01 pointed out, atheism is probably correlated with better formal education and higher income, which decrease the chance of ending up in jail. I'm not saying it is so, but it should be verified before jumping to conclusions. I bet that people fond of eating rabbit in a wine and garlic sauce are underrepresented in prisons as well. – Konrad Morawski Aug 29 '12 at 16:30

1 Answers1

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The 0.2% statistic comes from the The Home Office in the UK, not the US.

I found it on thoughtfulfaith.wordpress.com, which claims to debunk this claim and has a good use of internal citations.

(For archival purposes)

"[...] 31.9% of inmates claimed to have no religion, of whom 0.2% who specifically answered that they were atheists and 0.1% who answered that they were agnostic."

Thoughtful Faith

The blog is indeed true, as sad as it is. I checked the report and verified.

This is from the Atheism Stack Exchange Data Dump. I don't know the author since data dumps are anonymized.

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    Did they check for Jedi? :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon – Benjol May 16 '11 at 11:47
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    Data dumps are anonymized so you won’t find the author there. +1 for posting the answer. Unfortunately however, it is missing the comments which have some (in my opinion; full disclosure: they were my comments) interesting caveats about this statistic. In a nutshell: the statistic is highly implausible and I would attribute it to artifacts (technical details of the questionnaire) unless it can be corroborated. – Konrad Rudolph May 16 '11 at 12:15
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    The numbers are still very jumbled, though: "31.9% of inmates claimed to have “no religion”, of whom 0.2% who specifically answered that they were “atheists” and 0.1% who answered that they were “agnostic”" - are we using the 31.9% ? or the 0.2%? and for either: why? – Marc Gravell Aug 21 '12 at 12:33