November 28, 1981

Despite the defeat of the $500 million prison bond issue on Nov. 3, New York State prison officials say they still expect to have about 2,600 new inmate beds available by midsummer. But Thomas A. Coughlin 3d, the State Correction Commissioner, says the defeat will require new appropriations for support facilities for the prisoners who will occupy those beds. The cost would run to ''a minimum of $125 million,'' he said, for facilities ranging from new kitchen space to schools, and even that amount would provide fewer support services than the bond issue would have. And Mr. Coughlin, who noted that the state's prisons were operating at 111 percent of capacity, said he would also have to ask the Legislature for new spending authorization for three 512-bed prisons that were to have been constructed with the bond money.

The International Harvester Company, the No.1 maker of farm and construction equipment, reported yesterday that it lost $635.7 million on its regular business operations in the year ended Oct. 31, nearly 70 percent more than a year earlier. Harvester attributed the markedly wider operating loss in its 1981 fiscal year primarily to '' epressed world markets for its machinery, high interest expenses and industrywide price discounting.'' A spokesman for the company said that Harvester was optimistic that the United Automobile Workers Union would help the corporation negotiate a new credit line by accepting a proposal made previously to cut union benefits. He added that Harvester's salaried employees were going without raises, that stockholders were not getting dividends, that bankers holding loans were getting payments on interest but not on principal, and that many suppliers were holding the line on prices and expediting shipments to allow smaller inventories.

Lotte Lenya, a star of the German and American stage and films who championed the music of her husband, Kurt Weill, died in the Manhattan apartment of a friend last evening. She was 83 years old. Miss Lenya first attracted widespread attention in the 1928 Berlin production of Bertolt Brecht's and Weill's ''Threepenny Opera,'' and her fame was confirmed in the film version of 1931. Her stage career in this country was limited until after Weill's death in 1950. But with the 1954 Off Broadway revival of ''The Threepenny Opera'' she became a noted figure in the United States, subsequently appearing in numerous works of both Weill and Brecht as well as supervising and singing in a series of Weill recordings that inspired the present-day re-evaluation of his work. She also made a name for herself, independently of Weill, winning a Tony Award for her performance in ''Cabaret'' on Broadway and an Oscar for the film ''The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.''

Poland's Prime Minister and Communist Party leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, said today that the Politburo had instructed the Government to seek legislation banning strikes. He told the party's policy-making Central Committee that the move was needed because of the mounting economic, political and social crisis. The party leadership's initiative is focused at the heart of last year's agreement between the Government and the trade union movement Solidarity that gave the union the right to strike. General Jaruzelski made his speech in the morning, but it was withheld from the Polish public until late tonight. Solidarity leaders have not yet commented.

After half a century, the mold of British politics has been broken. That conclusion emerged inescapably today from the all but incredible by-election victory scored Thursday at Crosby, in the Liverpool suburbs, by the five-month-old alliance of the Social Democratic and Liberal Parties. Overturning a seemingly inv lnerable Conservative majority of 19,272 at the last general election, Shirley Williams won by 5,289 votes to become the first Social Democrat elected to the House of Commons under the party's own banner. An Awesome Demonstration So awesome was this latest demonstration of the alliance's electoral power that politicians and pundits alike found it difficult to keep their heads. Mrs. Williams's triumph, universally hailed as the most sensational British by-election result of the century, led some newspapers to describe her as the probable successor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Even the hard-headed bookmakers picked the alliance as odds-on favorites for the next general election.