Are atheists strongly underrepresented in US prison communities? This popularly referenced survey gives statistics about the number of atheists in US prisons. It suggests just 0.21% of the prison population is atheist. There are more scientologists! This is surprising because atheists represent about 15% of the US population. Now, this survey is often used to show that atheists are more moral. (I lean towards this idea, being an atheist myself.) However, I have been told that such a survey is useless - many "closet" atheists would be worried about reprisal from checking the "atheist" box, especially in a predominantly Christian environment. This would tend to bias the results. Has any research been performed about this?

> The 0.2% statistic comes from the The Home Office in the UK, not the US.
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> * Religion in Prisons 1999 and 2000
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> I found it on thoughtfulfaith.wordpress.com, which claims to debunk this claim and has a good use of internal citations.
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> (For archival purposes)
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> "[...] 31.9% of inmates claimed to have no religion, of whom 0.2% who specifically answered that they were atheists and 0.1% who answered that they were agnostic."
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> Thoughtful Faith
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> The blog is indeed true, as sad as it is. I checked the report and verified.

This is from the Atheism Stack Exchange Data Dump. I don't know the author since data dumps are anonymized.