Religion and prison stats

Today I'm looking at a break down of prisoners and their offences by religion. This actually came about because I was writing something else which went wrong and I didn't want to waste the number crunching I'd already done. The base figures are from home office stats for Sept. 2006.

Of those prisoners who expressed a 'preference' 32% of the total prison population said that they had "no religion" and 68% specified a specific faith. By comparing this total to the ten categories we can see which offences we see more religious people than we might expect and those where those without religion have greater representation.

The section in orange cover the offences where the religious are over represented. The section in yellow are those offences where there is a greater proportion of the "no religion" group than we might expect to see if this was evenly spread. The numbers indicate the proportion of the prison population (by offence and total).

The difference is pretty stark in some cases. Adhering to some sort of faith meant that you were far less likely to commit a motoring offence but far more likely to indulge in fraud, sexual offences, drugs and robbery.

So let's section off the Christians from the other religions for a moment. The figures you see here are the proportion of Christians compared to other faith groups so that of the various religions represented in prison just over 78% of them are Christians of one denomination or another.

What I find interesting here is that whilst drugs and fraud offences were high for religious people as a whole, Christians were significantly under represented in these areas (with Muslims taking these offences as their highest "scoring").


This calls from examination of the difference Christian denominations and once again, to my surprise, there was a massive difference between the faiths. By far the two largest groups of Christians were the Anglicans and Catholics who make up over 90% of the Christian prison population.

Of all the categories Catholics were the most under represented in sexual offences and Anglicans were the polar opposite, massively over represented. Now, I'll admit a bit of prejudice here - I always think of Catholics as, well, messed up sexually, and I was expecting to see this group over represented in this category. Quite the reverse is actually the case.

So I thought I'd dig into the stats on sexual offences. The numbers you see here are arrived at by dividing the proportion of the total prison population a particular religion is by the total proportion of the sexual offenders that same group makes up. Those with a number higher than one are groups where there are more sexual offenders than you might expect, those with less than one there are less sexual offenders. For example if a group had a score of 0.5 it would mean there were half as many of this group than we might expect to see if that group was spread evenly among the prison population.

As an example, for clarity, this does mean there are more Jewish sexual offenders than, say, Catholics. The hard numbers are 23 Jews in prison for sexual offences and 890 Catholics. It is simply that, as a proportion of the prison population we'd expect to see less Jews here and more Catholics.

To make it easy all the orange groups are over represented among sexual offenders and those in yellow are under represented. I'm not arguing cause and effect here, just looking at correlations. We should also bear in mind that people may well change their faith after committing an imprisonable offence.

As I say these numbers came out of something else so I'm not trying to make any particular claims for these stats, I just didn't want to see them go to waste. Plus I think they're interesting. All the hard numbers are available from the link at the beginning if you want to check my working (or feel free to ask questions about something I've not explored and I might be able to give you the answer from my work sheet).