"Given the data we have, and acknowledging its limits, self-professed atheists constitute an even smaller percentage of prisoners than we ever thought."
It is very obvious that atheists are the most moral group in society. None of the religious affiliations come within country mile. Sound reasoning generally leads to extremely sociable and compassionate behaviours. According to the numbers, if all of society were atheists, the n'er do wells in the Nation would fit into one prison! One has got to be extremely proud to be part of such a group of decent people.
patheos.com
"Of the prisoners willing to give their religious affiliations (and that’s an important caveat), atheists make up 0.07% of the prison population.
Not 1%.
Not even the 0.2% we’ve been using for so long.
Atheists constitute an even smaller percentage of the prison population than we ever imagined. (That includes prisoners whose affiliations were unknown. If I used Golumbaski’s method, the number would be 0.09%.)
In addition to that, Protestants make up 28.7% of the prison population; Catholics, 24%; Muslims, 5.5%; American Indians, 3.1%. I’ve put together a bare-bones spreadsheet with these numbers here — feel free to do with that what you will.
Keep in mind that these numbers only cover prisoners who self-reported their religious identification. They don’t represent all prisoners in the system. We will likely never have perfect numbers… but neither did Rod Swift.
We’re also only talking about prisoners in the federal prison system — about 218,000 people — not all prisoners in America.
Prisoners can change religious affiliations, too. We don’t know if these numbers represent what they believed when they committed their crime(s) or what they believed after they went through some personal transformation.
Finally, it’s also important to note that 17% of prisoners reported no religious preference. They’re not necessarily atheists and may even believe in a higher power. We really don’t know. 3% were "Other" and 3.44% were "Unknown." We can’t assume these people are atheists or Christian or anything else. However, if you combined the Atheist/No Religious Preference groups and lumped them together as "Nones," as some sociologists do, you’d get 17% of the prison population… I’m not sure that tells you anything useful, though, because of the murkiness of the labels.
…
When you look at Swift’s numbers from 1997 and the information here, there are some rough similarities. Yes, the raw numbers are different (we have a lot more prisoners now!) and some of the proportions have changed, but it seems very plausible to me that Swift really was given that data by Golumbaski.
Were we wrong to quote the 0.2% number for this long? Not necessarily… but I still don’t believe we had a good foundation for that. Using a shoddy website with no verifiable information as the basis for a claim we make is the type of thing we expect from religious people. We must be better than that.
Here’s another question worth asking: How does the prisoner data compare to the religious makeup of the general population? In other words, are atheists over-presented or under-represented in prison?
If you look at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (PDF), you’ll see that self-described atheists make up 1.6% of the population. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (PDF) puts atheists at 0.7% of the population. (If those numbers seem awfully low to you, make sure you’re not confusing atheists with the ever-rising percentage of "Nones.")
In both cases, atheists are *very* under-represented in prison and that’s heartening to see. (The proportion of Catholics in prison is about on par with their makeup in the general population, Muslims are over-represented in prison, and Protestants appear to be under-represented though you really have to look at individual denominations to get a clearer picture of what’s happening.)
Given the data we have, and acknowledging its limits, self-professed atheists constitute an even smaller percentage of prisoners than we ever thought." |
