Failure to pay is a crime. Someone who qualifies as indigent may be acquitted, only to be convicted of being too poor to pay for the legal services the Constitution requires the state to provide.

This is not justice.

There is, however, a way out of this, one that the presidential candidates of both parties should embrace, one that should have broad bipartisan appeal. And it is an approach that no one is talking about.

The federal government, which now provides just a few million dollars per year to prop up local indigent defense services, could make an annual grant of $4 billion to state and local governments for indigent defense. This is a mere 0.3 percent of the federal government’s approximately $1.2 trillion discretionary budget. This money would triple spending on indigent defense, especially if the grant was tied to pre-existing spending by local governments so they couldn’t just cut their own spending one-for-one with the grant.

For Democrats, this plan would target a major cost of poverty and inequality and, because of the correlation between wealth and race, it would tackle at least some of the racial imbalances that permeate the criminal justice system.

For Republicans, who worry about state overreach and the government’s ability to oppress its citizens, meaningful public defense ensures that the poor, too, are able to check the state when it is acting in its most powerful capacity.

Funding indigent defense would also help scale back mass incarceration, a goal both parties share. My research has shown that the primary source of prison growth in the 1990s and 2000s has been prosecutors’ filing of felony charges against more and more arrestees, many of whom in the past would have faced misdemeanor charges or no charges at all. Ensuring that prosecutors’ opponents are able to do their jobs competently would dampen prosecutorial aggressiveness.

Tellingly, as public defender caseloads have soared amid shrinking budgets, prosecutor caseloads appear to have held relatively steady, as funding and hiring of prosecutors generally rose over roughly the last 20 years. Public defenders find themselves at an increasing disadvantage, surely contributing to our nation’s inability to really rein in prison population growth.