ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : ‘Three Strikes’ and We’re All Out of Luck : Politics: Local impact of anti-crime legislation seems like an Irish stew, but it’s troublesome enough to make you want an Irish whiskey.

Perhaps it’s a subconscious desire to extend St. Patrick’s Day--but the local impact of “three strikes” legislation (designed to put repeat felons away more or less for life) seems to me like a good Irish stew. A wonderful variety of political vegetables contribute.

Floating on the surface is an apparently substantial meat-and-potatoes response to Orange County’s (and the rest of the state’s) hunger for less crime. Yet consider that just two days before St. Patrick’s Day, and about a week after “three strikes” legislation was signed into law, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren announced that crimes reported to California police had taken a nose-dive last year. Even more remarkable: Reports of crimes to California police have been heading down for a decade, while victim surveys (as opposed to reports of crime) have shown American crime rates slumping for more than two decades.

Near-unanimously, furthermore, criminologists doubt that “three strikes” will make a difference in the frequency even of the most violent of criminal offenses. Consider, they say, that we are not seeking to deter middle-aged guys with mortgages--but instead asocial youth for whom a felony conviction puts at risk no such stake in society.

And then there is the cost--an onion strong enough to make grown-ups weep. Billions of dollars for prison construction are apparently needed in the next five to 10 years, and the billion or two annually that would be required to operate them would kick in by decade’s end; and those dollars would come atop a corrections’ budget that’s already the state’s fastest-growing. (Some of the weeping is from higher education, which most observers think will lose money to the prisons’ budget).

Now let’s add some political parsnips, turnips, carrots and leeks. Try term limits, tax anathema, base closures and political pork.

Absolutely without impugning anybody’s motives, we may note that this is the kind of politics least likely to be mistaken for statesmanship. It’s benefit now, pay later, quite like deficit spending in Washington. This crop of legislators will in many instances have departed Sacramento before the piper must be fully paid. Proposition 140’s term limits contribute that parsnip to our stew.

Tax anathema turnips grow astonishingly well in Orange County, and, with few exceptions, both local leadership and Sacramento representatives are proud of it. Because Californians, with Orange County in the vanguard, want new prisons without any increase in taxes to pay for them, the money will have to be redirected from current state programs and services. When it is, look for those whose favorite programs are cut to show little sympathy when Orange County feels the pinch.

Add now to the stew that fine Irish carrot, base closures. Recall that Irvine and Mission Viejo are not exactly crazy about the Musick Honor Farm, and that much political blood has been spilled over the location of a new county jail. One might reasonably expect that Orange County would want someone else to host a state pen.

Yet it’s easy to imagine angry legislators from other counties taking delight in sticking a prison to Orange County, hotbed of pro-incarceration, anti-tax sentiment. There is little political cover, either. Our state legislators (save one), like all of our members of Congress, sit with the Republican minority, while Democrats hold the White House. If a Democrat--or a Pete Wilson too weakened, too inattentive, or unhappy with Orange County conservatives--were to round out the picture, the stage would be set for a local prison.

Of course, it may not happen. Other towns in the state may decide they want the steady source of jobs and wages that a prison brings.

In that instance, the local losses to “three strikes” may be more nearly proportionate to losses in the rest of the state. Like 57 other counties, Orange would have fewer roads, fewer college students, fewer opportunities for civil litigation (as court congestion predictably grows), shorter rations for public schools, poorer public health and more homeless.

Three strikes and we’re out, poorer alongside the rest of California, whether we’re home to a state penitentiary or not. It’s enough to make a man want not an Irish stew, but an Irish whiskey instead.