What are the crime rates by religion in USA?

Question

Not looking for hate crimes. Looking for percentage of crimes per capita broken down by religion of the perpetrator. (Example: 1M Protestants in USA, 10k crimes by Protestants, rate of 0.01% per capita.) Expecting to see a bar graph. Prefer a reputable source, not KKK. Might consider them if multiple opposing sources like an atheism organization show similar stats. Have only found an infographic. I know FBI has crime rates broken down by skin color, but unsure if they have them broken down by religion. Serious crimes (violent) vs. non-serious (victimless or non-violent) is a plus.

Answer 1

While official stats on actual affiliation of inmates are not measured, Pew did a study in 2012 that notes the following:

Presence of Various Faith Groups

The relative size of each faith group within the prison population is difficult to gauge. The Pew Forum survey asked chaplains to estimate the approximate percentage of inmates in the prisons where they work who identify with each of 12 religious groups. It should be noted, however, that these findings cannot be used to reliably estimate the religious affiliation of the U.S. prison population. They provide only an impressionistic portrait of the religious environment in which chaplains work.

On average, the chaplains surveyed say that Christians as a whole make up about two-thirds of the inmate population in the facilities where they work. Protestants are seen, on average, as comprising 51% of the inmate population, Catholics 15% and other Christian groups less than 2%. The median estimate of the share of Protestants is 50%, meaning that half of the chaplains estimate that Protestants comprise more than 50% of the inmate population where they work, and half of the chaplains estimate the figure to be below that.

The chaplains’ responses also suggest that many other faith groups are represented in the prison population. On average, the chaplains surveyed say that Muslims make up 9% of the inmates in the prisons where they work, with half of the chaplains saying that Muslims comprise 5% or less of the inmate population and half saying that Muslim inmates make up more than 5% of the inmates where they work. On average, other non-Christian groups are perceived as considerably smaller in size.

Chaplains’ perspectives on the religious makeup of inmates may reflect a number of different influences, including their degree of exposure to various groups in the course of their work. But even if the chaplains interviewed had perfect information about the relative distribution of religious groups among inmates in the prisons where they work, the findings would not be weighted in proportion to the size of the overall U.S. prison population. As a result, they would not provide an accurate count of religious affiliation in the U.S. prison population.

I would caution that this certainly does not measure affiliation against things like severity of crime, so is relatively meaningless for statistical correlation against concepts like violent crime, but only may have some relevance (with a very large grain of salt) against overall population figures on affiliation.

The closest thing to "official" numbers I could find was the following, but take note of the list of problems with the dataset that follows the chart, especially noting that the chart is based on a response of only 75,000 prisoners in federal prisons - which is peanuts compared to the total prison population.