What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists?

What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists? It’s a Lot Smaller Than We Ever Imagined

July 16, 2013 By Hemant Mehta What percentage of prisoners are atheists?

This is an important question with serious implications. If the number is high, it lends support to the idea that atheists are immoral. If the number is low, it might provide some proof that, indeed, atheists have their own moral compass that doesn’t involve a holy book.
For more than a decade, if you Googled this question, you were directed to one of two websites, both referring to the same information (though even that’s in dispute) given to a “Rod Swift” by Denise Golumbaski, a research analyst at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. According to them, atheists made up 0.2% of the prison population:
There were always a lot of problems with that information:

• The percentages did not take into account prisoners whose religious affiliations were unknown or who did not respond at all.
• The data in question is more than 15 years old. Whatever it may have represented in the past, it’s practically irrelevant now.
• There’s no link to any official document with this data, only HTML code that has gone unverified for well over a decade.
• The websites talking about this data aren’t unbiased. They’re clearly atheist sites trying to make atheists look good. While numbers don’t lie, without the primary documents, it’s hard to evaluate how objective this information is.
• Golumbaski, the research analyst, no longer works at the Federal Bureau of Prisons… so we couldn’t even confirm that she did this research.
• The Holysmoke.org website this information appears on doesn’t exactly exude credibility.
• It has been said that the U.S. doesn’t even keep any data on the religious beliefs of inmates. Tom Flynn once wrote in Free Inquiry: “… no prison I know of has permitted researchers to catalogue inmates’ religious affiliations. No such data has been kept by any department of corrections — or if kept, no such data has been released.”

Simply put, if a pastor offered this as evidence that Christians were all-but-absent in the U.S. Prison system, we’d mock the hell out of them. We’d ask for better evidence. We wouldn’t let them get away with such flimsy data.
So why, as skeptics, do we keep regurgitating this information?
As far as we know, it’s just hearsay. That’s not to say it’s wrong, only that we really don’t have a good reason to believe it other than “this guy on the Internet said so.”
But if you go online, none of that seems to matter. The 0.2% number — based off the Holysmoke.org website — pops up all over the place. Google shows more than 24,000 inbound links to the site. Plus, it seems like whenever an atheist talks about morality, this statistic inevitably comes up.
A few examples:
In a viral 2010 blog post for the Wall Street Journal, Ricky Gervais used the data to support his own atheism:

You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.