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Gov. Snyder announces his plan for criminal justice reform at Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit Monday May 18, 2015.

(Tanya Moutzalias | MLive Detroit)

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is on a crusade to reform the state's criminal justice system. He's being true to the pragmatic fiscal thinking that put him in the job in the first place, and kept him there, and if he gets his way this could deservedly become a signature reform that defines his second term.

His success will be limited only by Republicans whose thinking on crime and punishment is stuck somewhere in a 1980s campaign spot from some self-professed "tough on crime" conservative. The evidence since then is overwhelming that most of the United States - including Michigan - is responsible for the most financially and morally inept criminal justice system in the developed world.

Michigan currently puts 570 out of every 100,000 adults in a government cage. The average for other states is 542. (The national average - factoring in federal inmates - is 623 per 100,000.) As of 2013, according to the most recent report from the U.S. Department of Justice, that's 43,759 Michigan residents waking up behind a $30,000 row of taxpayer-financed prison bars each morning.

There's no remotely close comparison for this anywhere in any wealthy Western democracy. Considering just the English-speaking nations most like our own: The United Kingdom locks up just 141 per 100,000, Australia 144, and Canada 118. Non-English speaking wealthy nations are even lower: France is at 100 and Germany at 76.

Drive across the Ambassador Bridge and you'll be in a nation of more than 35 million people - 3.5 times the population of Michigan, but otherwise people not much different from our side of the water. The corrections population for all of Canada, from Atlantic to Pacific and all the way up to the Arctic Circle, is just over 41,000 inmates - thousands less than the number of people Michigan locks up all by itself.

Defenders of this disparity will claim most every inmate is where he (or in rarer cases she) belongs, more or less for as long as he deserves. But that's absurd. If these lockup numbers are justified because the people of Michigan and the United States are just naturally five times more crime-prone and violent than Canadians and every other English-speaking people on the globe, then the entire basis of the limited government philosophy and self governance is a sham.

The reality is we are not a lawless people so out of control that we need the world's largest collection of cages. Instead, we have a profoundly failed big government policy of policing, capturing, sentencing and reforming lawbreakers, layered atop a collection of too many rules to break in the first place. The governor's proposed reforms would begin to address all of these errors. They remain largely unresolved today because too many of those working within the system resist change, and too many "tough on crime" conservatives credulously believe whatever they are told by the people with the badges.

It's time to recognize that we couldn't do worse if we tried. If Gov. Snyder's reforms and many more that are needed were to succeed in bringing our lockup rate down to that of our Canadian neighbors, we'd have just over 9,000 inmates, rather than nearly 44,000. That's $1 billion for Michigan and more than $38 billion across the nation that could be much better spent on smarter crime prevention and much else.

Limited government conservative should be the governor's best allies in this fight. There's not much they should love nor defend about our bloated, big government prison spending.

Ken Braun was a legislative aide for a Republican lawmaker in the Michigan House and worked for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He has assisted in a start-up effort to encourage employers to provide economic education to employees, and is currently the director of policy for InformationStation.org. His employer is not responsible for what he says here, on Facebook, or Twitter ... or in Spartan Stadium on game days.