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0 pointssleepysysadmin4y ago0 comments

>I think almost everything you say about Japan is wrong.

Tiny part of my comment, no offense or anything. Certainly hoping to learn where I am wrong.

>"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%

To be fair, it's hard to compare to English law systems. Perhaps it's totally fine, but when you connect the forced labour. I have questions that are unanswered.

>so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).

Conviction rate in Canada is ~63%, even lower if you exclude plea deals. We could go into discussion about how for-profit prison system in the USA or illegitimate crimes being enforced. I'm pretty sure 93% is way too high and it's around ~70%.

>"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.

I think maybe we are comparing apples to oranges here.

>(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)

I will concede this. "In a gulag" was improper. The japanese prisons are not political prisoners like communism. As you say, most prison sentences are forced labour. There's the problem I have with Japan.

>The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012

266.20% in 2020. Covid made it jump almost 30%

>But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).

Fair, I was saying that the only reason Japan hasnt collapsed to about 30% poverty like Greece is because of the forced labour.

>About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".

Japan is suspiciously low. Kind of impossibly low. Which in the context of the allegation that people are slaves. In a country with many yakuza orgs, sex trafficing, and some pretty strict rules around many other things(porn for example) it seems to me these numbers are impossible.

One day we will find out what the real numbers are. It also seems to me that clearance rates are impossible. Japan clears arson at >70%? The hell? impossible.

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gjm114y ago

On the US conviction rate: page 8 of https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao/legacy/2013... says "Of the 87,709 defendants terminated during Fiscal Year 2012, 80,963, or 93 percent, either pled guilty or were found guilty. [...] The rate of conviction remained over 90 percent, as it has since Fiscal Year 2001." I believe that "terminated during FY2012" here means that they went to trial, and their trial ended during that year.

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?

dragonwriter4y ago

> I believe that “terminated during FY2012” here means that they went to trial, and their trial ended during that year.

It means their charges were resolved during that year; very often (guilty pleas plus charges dropped) without trial.

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