Atheists supply less than 1 percent of US prison population.

       by Wayne Aiken, North Carolina Director, American Atheists
 


It's surprising how many people remark to me, "You're an Atheist? You
must have no conscience about committing crime then." Nothing could be
further from the truth. In fact, if we examine the population of our
prisons, we see a very different picture.

In "The New Criminology," Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that
two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without
religious training is about 1/10th of 1%. W.T. Root, Professor of Psychology
at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said,
"Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding
that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers were absent from
penitentiaries, or nearly so.

During 10 years in Sing-Sing, of those executed for murder 65% were
Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1%
non-religious.

Steiner and Swancara surveyed Canadian prisons and found 1,294 Catholics,
435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and 1 Unitarian.
Dr. Christian, Superintendent of the N.Y. State Reformatories, checked
records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only 4 college graduates. In
"Who's Who," 91% were college graduates; Christian commented that
"intelligence and knowledge produce right living," and, "crime is the
offspring of superstition and ignorance."

Surveyed Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.
In Joliet Prison, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617
Methodists and no prisoners identified as non-religious.

Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in the state population; but
in the prisons, there were 22 times as many Baptists as Jews, and 18 times as
many Methodists as Jews. In Sing-Sing, there were 1,553 inmates, 855 of them
(over half) Catholics, 518 Protestants, 117 Jews, and 8 non-religious.
Steiner first surveyed 27 states and found 19,400 Christians, 5,000 with
no preference and only 3 Agnostics (one each in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Illinois).

A later, more exhaustive survey found 60,605 Christians,
5,000 Jews, 131 Pagans, 4,000 "no preference," and only 3 Agnostics.
In one 19-state survey, Steiner found 15 non-believers, Spiritualists,
Theosophists, Deists, Pantheists and 1 Agnostic among nearly 83,000 inmates.
He labeled all 15 as "anti-christians." The Elmira, N.Y. reformatory system
overshadowed all others, with nearly 31,000 inmates, including 15,694
Catholics (half) and 10,968 Protestants, 4,000 Jews, 325 refusing to answer,
and 0 unbelievers.

In the East, over 64% of inmates are Roman Catholic. Throughout the
national prison population, they average 50%. A national census of the
general population found Catholics to be about 15% (and they count from the
diaper up). Hardly 12% are old enough to commit a crime, and half of these
are women. That leaves an adult Catholic population of 6% supplying 50% of
the prison population.

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