A question that atheists are often asked is "If you don't have a god to give you moral guidance, then you can commit any crime you want, right?" Well, I say go by the statistics. So I looked up a list of crime statistics organized by religion on www.positiveatheism.org, and the results I saw did not surprise me.
In "The New Criminology," Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without religious training is about one-tenth of one percent. W.T. Root, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said, "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers were absent from penitentiaries, or nearly so.
During 10 years in Sing-Sing, of those executed for murder 65 percent were Catholics, 26 percent Protestants, six percent Hebrew, two percent Pagan, and less than one-third of one percent non-religious.
In Canadian prisons there were 1,294 Catholics, 435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and one Unitarian.
The superintendent of the N.Y. State Reformatories, checked records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only four college graduates. He commented that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living," and, "crime is the offspring of superstition and ignorance."
A survey of Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.
In Joliet Prison, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617 Methodists and no prisoners identified as non-religious.
Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in the state population; but in the prisons, there were 22 times as many Baptists as Jews, and 18 times as many Methodists as Jews. In Sing-Sing, therewere 1,553 inmates, 855 of them (over half) Catholics, 518 Protestants, 117 Jews, and 8 non-religious.
Steiner first surveyed 27 states and found 19,400 Christians, 5,000 with no preference and only 3 Agnostics (one each in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Illinois). A later, more exhaustive survey found 60,605 Christians, 5,000 Jews, 131 Pagans, 4,000 "no preference," and only 3 Agnostics.
In one 19-state survey, Steiner found 15 non-believers, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Deists, Pantheists and one Agnostic among nearly 83,000 inmates. He labeled all 15 as "anti-Christians." The Elmira, N.Y. reformatory system overshadowed all others, with nearly 31,000 inmates, including 15,694 Catholics (half) and 10,968 Protestants, 4,000 Jews, 325 refusing to answer, and no unbelievers.
In the East, over 64 percent of inmates are Roman Catholic. Throughout the national prison population, they average 50 percent. A national census of the general population found Catholics to be about 15 percent (and they count from the diaper up). Hardly 12 percent are old enough to commit a crime. That leaves an adult Catholic population of 12 percent supplying 50 percent of the prison population.