According to the BOP, 1.9 percent of federal prisoners identify as Rasta, but the Census Bureau doesn’t list Rastafarians as a separate group. To answer your question, I used Census Bureau data from 2008 (it’s the most recent we have), but its categories are pretty different from the ones used by the Bureau of Prisons. Seventeen percent of inmates listed “no preference” for their religion, but the Bureau of Prisons couldn’t clarify how that is different from the 3 percent of prisoners who described themselves as “Other,” so I decided to cut it out of the data. The data here is self-reported, so it’s also dependent on whether prisoners were willing to disclose their religion. While you may have been interested in the religious affiliation of the 1.4 million Americans being held in state prisons, this data only relates to federal prisoners - of which there were about 216,000 in 2013 (PDF). Today, those numbers are still the most detailed ones available.īut first, a few caveats. Hemant Mehta (a writer who, seven years earlier, had become famous for selling his soul on eBay) issued a new Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Bureau of Prisons asking for updated figures about the religious affiliation of prisoners. That number became a routinely cited statistic that wasn’t really challenged or updated - until 2013.
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