Crime of the century.

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 newspaper back pages - or that would have been totally ignored - suddenly make the front pages and the evening newscasts. Sundry experts are summoned to engage in learned discourse on what needs to be done about crime. Pundits weigh in with their analyses. Before long, every media consumer is convinced that there must be a problem or everyone wouldn't be talking about it.

Actually, the crime rate in the United States has remained quite stable, as even the FBI'S statistics confirm. It has always been too high - ours is, by history and tradition, a relatively violent and lawless culture - but it's lower now than it was at some times in the past. But people seem to perceive a shocking increase in crime, and that phenomenon deserves some thought.

For some time now - not just during the Reagan/Bush years but for several decades - the gap between rich and poor has been widening in the United States. An utterly impoverished population - homeless or living in squalid slums, jobless or subsisting on illegal earnings in the underground economy - has impressed itself on the consciousness of more and more Americans. Most members of the upper and middle classes understand, consciously or subconsciously, that this growing underclass represents a potential threat to their comfortable affluence. And the answer they have confected to this potential threat is to "crack down on crime."

For the media and the politicians and the nation's corporate elites, that crackdown, that concern with crime, is a welcome diversion. If people can be induced to worry about crime, they won't wonder why a "recovering" economy is still unable to provide jobs for an official 7 per cent - and an unofficial but accurate 15 per cent - of its work force. If people can be persuaded that their government is doing its best to round up and incarcerate offenders, they won't wonder why it can't do a better job of protecting natural resources and repairing the environment. If people can be convinced that they are being protected from the violent criminals who roam the streets at night, they'll be less inclined to worry about the criminals in three-piece suits who roam the corridors of power.

That our entire political system is geared to inducing and then catering to public hysteria about crime is a solemn indictment of the way we have arranged our public life. It's the crime of the century.