The crime rates show an erratic trend that reflects the government's occasional campaign directed at curbing forms of behavior regarded as injurious to the country's socialist experiment. Increasing rates of theft and corruption by party and public officials is noted and placed in the context of Tanzania's economic problems and the policy of egalitarianism. Thus Tanzania's experience lead us to doubt Brady's (1982) optimism that socialism offers the best hope for reducing crime and corruption in the third world. (Author abstract)