After obtaining independence from Great Britain in 1961, Tanzania, with a population consisting of 90 percent peasants, moved toward socialism. In 1967, with the Arusha Declaration, the government asserted its desire to build a socialist State. Since that time, however, Tanzania's economic growth has been severely hampered by scarce foreign exchange resources, and in an attempt to control its disappointed and restless population, the government has relied on preventive detention law and coercive police and paramilitary groups. Minimum sentences legislation is discussed, along with vagrancy and human resources deployment laws, which repatriate the unemployed from the cities to rural areas to work on sisal and tea plantations. The Penal Code was amended in 1983 to further deal with vagrants and the unemployed. Criminal sanctions, in the form of bye-laws, exist to enforce farming and other agricultural activities. The author concludes that Tanzania's economic and criminal justice system can be improved only by an agrarian revolution that renders the country less vulnerable to international capitalism. 12 footnotes.