No Time For Crime: More Religious Communities Have Lower Rates Of Black, White and Latino Violence

[Jim__]

38. First, you're trying to compare apples and oranges without full access to either.

Look at the abstract for Ulmer and Harris' study (my bolding):

Research has demonstrated that concentrated disadvantage and other measures are strongly associated with aggregate-level rates of violence, including across racial and ethnic groups. Less studied is the impact of cultural factors, including religious contextual measures. The current study addresses several key gaps in prior literature by utilizing race/ethnic-specific arrest data from California, New York, and Texas paired with religious contextual data from the Religious Congregations and Memberships Survey. Results suggest that, net of important controls, (1) religious contextual measures have significant crime-reducing associations with violence; (2) these associations are race/ethnic specific; and (3) religious contextual measures moderate the criminogenic association between disadvantage and violence for blacks. Implications for future research are discussed.

Their study seems to be mostly concerned with violent crime and how religiosity affects that. The percentages that you cite have to do with total federal inmate population. What percentage of federal inmates are in prison for the type of crime this study was concerned with?

Here are the conclusions the study reached:

• Black and white violence decreased significantly as the percentage rose of county residents who belonged to congregations or were regular attenders.
• Black and Latino violence was lower in communities where residents belonged to similar types of religious institutions, indicating faith groups from similar traditions were able to exert greater influence on community values when they had a significant presence.
• Religious homogeneity was not associated with overall rates of white violence, but further breakdowns showed communities with larger percentages of evangelicals had lower rates of white violence. Latino violence was significantly reduced in communities with large numbers of active Catholics.
• Black violence dipped dramatically in counties with high levels of poverty, unemployment and low levels of education where large percentages of residents were active in congregations. This is a key finding, as communities with severe social and economic disadvantages are more likely to have high violent crime rates.

You are citing percentages of inmates as evidence that religiosity doesn't reduce crime. But, suppose two counties were demographically similar except that one is more religious (note the breakdown of religious identity can be similar, but one has, say, higher church attendance) and that the more religious county had a significantly lower crime rate. Would that show up in the self-identified religious percentages of the inmates from those counties?

You need more information to come to any conclusions about that study.