A friend and I were having a debate about religion and one thing she pointed out was that there were far more violent felons in prison who were Atheist than a member of an organized religion. I asked for a cite, and she said she’d be able to dig one up when she got back from work.
Personally, I believe the perception is skewed that violent felons are just a bunch of godless Atheists, brought on in part by people being ‘born again’ in prison. I think a fair portion of violent felons are sociopaths, and the idea of converting to a religion in prison is a ploy to come off as being more sympathetic- or simply a coping/survival thing.
I also believe someone who is strongly religious and yet murders/rapes people is going to use their belief system as a rationale for their actions, while someone who doesn’t believe in a higher power is going to be more likely to take ownership for their actions.
Seems to support the idea that most prison inmates identify with a religion. Which is what you would expect in a country with such a large religious population.
Also supports the notion that most criminals were not religiously active upon incarceration, which is not particularly surprising either.
Time for me to pop 'round and say again: the most genuinely and deeply moral people I have ever personally known were the ones who identified as atheists or agnostic or something decidedly lacking in heavy dogma and theism.
The most genuinely and deeply immoral people I have ever known or have heard of in my life believed in some dogmatic and god-centered religion of some kind at some point in their lives.
So based on my own unscientific observations I’d answer “Absolutely not.”
Something like 80 to 90 percent of people in the U.S. identify with a religion, and Jas09’s cite says the figure is more than 90 percent. If there were numerically more atheists than theists in prison, that would be a shockingly large imbalance.
I await the OP’s friend’s cite. It would be interesting. In the meantime I’ll point out that if morality is associated with religion and illegal behavior is somehow associated with atheism then we would expect there to almost zero religious people in prison. If not then religion clearly doesn’t work very well in controlling immoral and illegal behavior.
Serious answer to an un-serious question: the “born-again” phenomenon most commonly functions as a way for a person who is already Christian to re-commit to a stricter form of Christianity after a lapse.
I see a false dichotomy here. Being an atheist is a matter of belief (or lack thereof); being a member of an organized religion is a matter of, well, being a member of some organization. It’s entirely possible for a person to be neither, or both.
I wouldn’t be surprised if members of organized religions were less likely to go to prison, because being a member of organized religion indicates a willingness to be a joiner, to play by the rules, to be part of a group, to submit to some sort of societal authority.
And as for sociopaths, I’d take their religiosity, before or after prison, with a large grain of salt. I’d suspect it of being manipulative and self-serving, and I wouldn’t expect it to tell me much of anything about the religion itself or its members in general.
Trying to divide people into two distinct camps is tricky business, especially given the time frames involved.
People change; they grow, they revert, they take new paths. The eighteen-year-old kid doing 20 years for a gang-related homicide will be a different person by the time the sentence is complete.
Being one of the ‘religious folk’ doesn’t necessarily mean being good, or even having good intentions. Examples from the Christian religion: You’ll find plenty of people who want Jesus to save them from their sins, but you’ll find just as many who want Jesus to save them from personal accountability. Less common are those who believe in God, but who either openly war against Him or who believe that they’re already damned to Hell.
Personally, I think that most people–whether religious or atheist–are at least little agnostic, no matter what they profess outwardly.
Given all that, I don’t think that you’ll be able to get hard numbers on the question.
Most people who find Jesus were already raised Christian but they “find” Jesus (again?) with the help of whatever religious group they’re currently hanging out with.