During 10 years in Sing-Sing, those executed for murder were 65% Catholics, 26% Protestants, 6% Hebrew, 2% Pagan, and less than 1/3 of 1% non-religious.
Steiner and Swancara surveyed Canadian prisons and found 1,294 Catholics, 435 Anglicans, 241 Methodists, 135 Baptists, and 1 Unitarian. Dr. Christian, Superintendant of the NY State Reformatories, checked 22,000 prison inmates and found only 4 college graduates. In "Who's Who" 91% were college graduates, and he commented that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living" and that "crime is the offspring of superstition and ignorance."
In Joliet, there were 2,888 Catholics, 1,020 Baptists, 617 Methodists and 0 non-religious. .
Michigan had 82,000 Baptists and 83,000 Jews in their 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, there were 1,553 total inmates with 855 of them Catholics (over half), 518 Protestants, 177 Jews and 8 non- religious. .
A significant number of inmates who were members of a denomination but inactive, or weren't anything in particular before their incarceration, have what is known in the trade as a "jailhouse conversion".
The Catholics get a considerable number of these conversions for a couple of reasons: (1) they have extremely active prison ministries, so they're there; (2) you get to go to daily Mass and therefore get out of the block; (3) it looks good on your parole application.
A fellow who murdered one of our family members was a non-church-attending Episcopalian until he got sent to prison. Now he's a Catholic and tells everybody (especially the Parole Board) all about it.
I'm sure there are some who experience an honest conversion and a call to holiness, as well. I haven't happened to meet any of them yet, but . . . .