Atheists in Prison

It is commonly claimed by atheists that they are under-represented in the prison population. This claim is not justified.
=== UK ===
According the UK's home office the March 2000 report, Religion in Prisons, 31.9% of inmates claimed to have "no religion", including 0.2% atheists and 0.1% answering agnostic. This compares with (taking data from the national census), 15.5% of people with answered "no religion" and 7.3% who did not answer the question. giving a total of between 15.5% and 22.8% of the general population who are atheists, well short of the numbers in the prison population.
=== USA ===
It is often claimed by atheists that US atheists make up 0.2% of the prison population, but around 10% of the population. This claim was seemingly started, by Rod Swift, who wrote it on his website from where it circulated around the Internet. He claims that that he contacted Denise Golumbaski, an employee of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and got the following response:
It is concerning that there is no official source for this data. There's no way to verify any of these numbers, or to know how they were obtained.
The number of people in the general population answering that their religion was atheist at the time was around 0.5%, as compared with 0.2% identifying as atheist in the prison population. It seems plausible that many atheists simply did not answer what religion they were, or answered that they had none. Around 19.8% of people included here responded with "Unknown/No Answer", leaving the numbers of atheists in US prisons between 0.2% and 20.0% making conclusions about the number of atheists in US prisons hard to draw. 
Finally, it's worth noting the inflated number of atheists Rod Smith claims in the US general population. In the general population Rod Swift claimed that the number of atheists was between 8% and 16%, whereas Gallop polls consistently show that between 94% and 96% of Americans believe in God.
== Links ==
* UK religious beliefs of inmates.
* Atheist blogger: Atheists in prision, what are the facts
* Prison Incarceration and Religious Adherence
* Article about this subjec on Apologetics wiki
Category:Anti-Christian Myths