Claim:
"In the United States, atheists are vastly underrepresented in prisons compared to the percentage of them in everyday life."
Answer:
It so turns out that it was easier to find articles related to religiousness and crime. Again, it seems, that all the evidence points to the opposite direction to what you suggest.
Lipford, McCormick and Tollison write in "Preaching matters" for example that:
"Taken as a whole, the results suggest that organized religion promotes certain public goods in an economy. Illegitime births and crime rates, for example, are negatively related to church membership by state, all else equal."
Akers and Cochran on on the other hand write in "Beyond Hellfire: An exploration of the variable effects of religiosity on adolescent marihuana and alcohol use" that:
"Sloane and Potvin (1986) find similar results and arrive at the same conclusion. As a consequence, we argue, with confidence, that religion truly does have demonstrable potent effects. These are of moderate magnitude but are consistent enough to be formulated into an empirical generalization: Religiosity is inversely related to delinquent behavior."
Evans, Cullen, Dunaway and Burton find in "Religion and Crime Reexamined" that:
"Religion, as indicated by religious activities, had direct personal effects on adult criminality as measured by a broad range of criminal acts. Further, the relationship held even with the introduction of secular controls, and did not depend on social and religious contexts. Thus, measured as an individual behavioral trait, religion's effects persist over a wide range of crime."
Wlliam Sims Bainbridge writes in "The Religious Ecology of Deviance" that:
"Substantial negative associations between rates of church membership and rates of crime and cultism survive statistical controls."
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