Crime of the century.

• Position: 'three strikes and you're out' political hysteria - Editorial

Lock 'em up and throw away the key, proclaims the cover of the February 7 issue of Time magazine. That's the national mood, all right. The pollsters tell us that crime has supplanted the economy as the number-one concern of most Americans. It's the prime topic on radio call-in shows and TV talk programs. It gets daily front-page play in the newspapers. And, of course, it's the public preoccupation of politicians at every level of government.

Bill Clinton's tough talk about crime got the big applause in his State of the Union address. His remarks, appallingly reminiscent of Richard Nixon's law-and-order rhetoric of more than a quarter century ago, were the one part of the speech that won the heart of Bob Dole, the Senate Republican leader. Clinton referred to his proposal of life imprisonment for three-time violent offenders as "three strikes and you're out"; Dole called it "three strikes and you're in - for life." It's a difference they can probably iron out in conference.

In their eagerness to pander to the public obsession with crime, politicians are resorting to blatant foolishness. The Administration's omnibus crime bill, now pending in Congress, would make it a capital offense to kill a Federal chicken inspector. Some state legislatures are considering measures to outlaw drive-by shootings - as if they had been legal up to now. Elsewhere, bills have been introduced to make it a crime to shoot bus drivers.

Such nonsense aside, the national crime binge has its deadly serious aspects. One of these is the tendency to fight crime by consigning constitutional rights to the scrap heap: Police feel free to engage in illegal searches and seizures, prosecutors ignore due process, juveniles are stripped of their hard-won rights - and the courts go along with all of this lest they be charged with being "soft on crime." Another problem is the consignment of nonviolent and minor offenders to prisons, where they are brutalized and usually schooled in more serious forms of crime. And the cost of all this - of hiring cops and building penal institutions and staffing them with guards - comes out of funds that ought to be allotted to meeting human needs.

Why the national uproar over crime? Part of it is, of course, simply the consequence of media hype. Once the media have satisfied themselves that crime stands at the top of the public's agenda, they can easily cater to the craving for crime news. Police items that formerly would have been consigned to...