Would someone born under the sign of Aries more likely end up convicted of a crime than someone born under the sign of Cancer? Would an Aquarius gravitate to low-level offenses and a Gemini to more serious crimes? Which zodiac sign has the highest incarceration rate?
Skeptics of astrology might groan at such questions, while believers in the occult might perk up at such hypotheses. Up to now, though, neither group — actually, no one — definitively knew the answers.
Extensive research by the San Quentin News and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism has found that no one has ever proved or disproved any correlation between zodiac signs and incarceration and crime. Searches of academic databases EBSCO and JSTOR, available at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center through Mount Tamalpais College, and searches of the wider Internet conducted at UC Berkeley, found no academic studies or similar articles about this question.
Astrology has a long history. Luis Campos Ribeiro wrote in the Annals of Science that up to the 17th century, astrology enjoyed a reputation as an academic discipline, and had a variety of practical applications, from weather forecasting to assessing the success of sea voyages. Astrology once made news but newspapers have since relegated it to the fluff pages.
This article, though purely statistical in nature and limited to a sample set of 3,200 Level II incarcerated persons at San Quentin in September 2024, definitively proved the answer. As of the date of its publication, it remained the first such research of its kind.
The question explored whether certain zodiac signs seemed more prone to incarceration and hence, criminality, than other signs. If yes, then SQRC should have a disproportionate distribution of signs.
The San Quentin News calculated that variations in the distribution of zodiac signs remained roughly close to one percentage point, or in statistical terms, quite even. In short: the data show that no one sign stood out as particularly criminogenic.
An analysis of San Quentin’s population categorized the residents by zodiac-signs-by-building with percentages relative to the buildings. The category “San Quentin” categorized signs for the entire institution. In any category, the numbers remained close to the average of 8.33% (or 1 divided by 12, the number of signs). Leo and Libra showed the greatest divergences but these divergences remained too small to hold statistical significance. The distributions remained statistically even.
The analysis evaluated differences in the degree of seriousness of crime by comparing zodiac signs at H-Unit, which housed low-level offenders with short-term sentences, with signs at the five other housing units, which housed offenders with more serious crimes and longer sentences or life sentences. As in the other examination, the distributions showed no statistically significant difference.
Both the San Quentin News and UC Berkeley Graduate Journalism School also looked for scientific evidence in academic papers that would verify astrology as a viable tool for prediction of crime, but neither one found any. Research with academic databases EBSCO and JSTOR also found nothing that lent any credibility to astrology.
One scholarly article attributed academic authority to astrology by associating it with parapsychology (the study of phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance), but the writer of the article turned out to have worked as a practicing astrologer. A few other academic works considered the psychological results of astrology similar to the placebo effect — beneficial outcomes arising from positive expectations — but such a comparison, by definition, would prove astrology ineffective. No papers presented evidence that astrology functionally worked.
Astrology appeared best described by the paper “A double-blind test of astrology,” published in the science journal Nature, Vol. 318, December 5, 1985, by Shawn Carlson. In the paper’s conclusion, Carlson wrote, “We are now in a position to argue a surprisingly strong case against natal astrology as practiced by reputable astrologers. Great pains were taken to insure that the experiment was unbiased and to make sure that astrology was given every reasonable chance to succeed.”
Carlson’s next sentence summarized his findings about astrology.
He wrote, “It failed.”
— Erika Zaro, who studies investigative reporting at UC Berkeley and has extensive expertise in astrology, contributed to the story
