That does seem like it's the figure that's formally comparable to Japan's alleged 99.9% conviction rate, no?
It may well be that in the US, as in Japan but to a lesser extent, cases are dropped when it doesn't seem like they will get a conviction. And of course the US tries very hard to persuade people to plead guilty by threatening them with extra-harsh sentences if they don't but are found guilty.
What apples and oranges do you think are being compared?
You said that 99.9% of people accused of a crime in Japan go to prison and have to work there. Which of the following do you disagree with?
1. Only about 40% of people accused of a crime in Japan have their cases go to trial at all, rather than being abandoned.
2. Only about 15% of people convicted of a crime in Japan go to prison.
3. If only 40% of people accused have a trial, and only 15% of convicted people go to prison, then at most 6% of people accused go to prison and have to work there.
4. 6% is smaller than 99.9%.
You haven't given any justification for your claim that "the only reason Japan hasn't collapsed to about 30% poverty like Greece is because of the forced labour". Again, there simply aren't enough people in prison in Japan for anything like that to be true.
You say you don't believe their figures. That's your choice, I guess. But it seems like quite a stretch, especially if you expect this to rescue your claim that forced prison labour has somehow saved Japan from otherwise inevitable economic disaster.
The official figures say that about 0.4% of the Japanese population is in prison. What fraction of the population would have to be in (I think almost all low-skilled) kinda-sorta-slavery to make the difference between an economy like Japan's and an economy like Greece's? I can't see how less than, say, 4% could do that. (I'd actually have thought it would need to be a lot more.)
In other words, for your theory to work, there'd need to be some sort of secret prison population ~10x the size of the official prison population. How are you suggesting that happens? Do you think lots of people who are officially reported as having been fined were actually hauled off to prison? (How come their friends don't notice that the official accounts have been falsified?) Do you think there are secret prisons in Japan that no one knows about, where these people are held? Or what?
