The Atheist Blogger

It has long been said that atheists make up 0.2% of the prison population in the US, even though 10% of the entire US population is atheist. This sounds all very well and good for atheists, as it shows how you can be moral without God (or that atheists are better at evading the law enforcement officers). I haven’t used the argument much in the past since I live in the UK, but I have recently questioned the veracity of this claim.

As far as I can tell, the claim was first espoused by Rod Swift, who wrote it on this website. He claims that he contacted research analyst Denise Golumbaski, who works at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and was sent the following information:

Dear Mr. Swift:


The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious affiliations of inmates.
The following are total number of inmates per religion category:

Response              Number      %
----------------------------  --------
Catholic               29267   39.164%
Protestant             26162   35.008%
Muslim                  5435    7.273%
American Indian         2408    3.222%
Nation                  1734    2.320%
Rasta                   1485    1.987%
Jewish                  1325    1.773%
Church of Christ        1303    1.744%
Pentecostal             1093    1.463%
Moorish                 1066    1.426%
Buddhist                 882    1.180%
Jehovah Witness          665    0.890%
Adventist                621    0.831%
Orthodox                 375    0.502%
Mormon                   298    0.399%
Scientology              190    0.254%
Atheist                  156    0.209%
Hindu                    119    0.159%
Santeria                 117    0.157%
Sikh                      14    0.019%
Bahai                      9    0.012%
Krishna                    7    0.009%
----------------------------  --------
Total Known Responses  74731  100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this)

This immediately raises concerns, as the information contained in this email isn’t backed up by any raw data, nor is it presented via an official website. The fact that Denise Golumbaski apparently works for the government is of no importance, as it is an argument from authority. Yes, you would expect her not to make up statistics, but we cannot verify the details through this email. Interestingly, this unauthorised and unverified information turns up on many many atheist websites, as well as in the book “The God Hypothesis” by Victor Stenger (paperback page 210, #2 in the Notes section).

So I continued to search. An interesting article was written at a theistic website that brings up the same points I have raised, and also offers “updated” statistics that merge people who did not answer with the “atheists” row. This erroneous data handling brings the percentage of atheists in prison up to just under 20%. Neither article actually links to statistics provided by a government website, and I have yet to find a government website that presents any information; this was after a good hour using Google.

What I did find was details from the UK’s home office, outlining the statistics of March 2000 in English and Welsh prisons, which said that 32% of inmates answered “no religion”. A year later in April the national census was answered by 92% of the UK population, and found that only 15.5% of people had “no religion”. The question about religion was optional and was answered by 92.7% of those asked, so if the remaining 7.3% were atheists who simply didn’t put a religion down, we can estimate that the number of atheists in the UK at the time was between 15.5% and 22.8% of the population.

What I think this shows is that the issue of religion and prisons is far more complex than the 0.2% statistic makes out. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, so a high number of atheists in prison doesn’t necessarily mean atheism is the root cause of their lawbreaking. The number of Christians that are also in prison should be a clear indicator of that. Although I cannot speak for the US, which probably has more factors such as prison conversions and the distrust of atheists (causing some atheists to answer “Christian” on surveys), I think what is clear is that the statistics in the US are dubious at best. A healthy dose of skepticism calls to question the source of the data, and whether it is actually accurate.

My conclusion of the whole thing is simply to not use the argument until some proper facts are shown that show a massive discrepancy between religion and prison population. Then, and only then will such an argument be justified, although I still think we can make better arguments about the source of our morality. Perhaps atheists are underrepresented in American prisons, but why then are they overrepresented in the UK prisons? Perhaps us British atheists are simply terribly bad at avoiding the police. We may never know, but I’d certainly like to see more investigations into religious beliefs before and after incrimination, as it may lead to some interesting results.