Minimum sentences in Tanzania

To what extent do the methods of treating criminal offenders in African states require revision ? This question is increasingly under discussion at present. Problems of crime and punishment are changing. To some extent such problems appear in a changed form after the end of the colonial period, when foreign governments have been replaced by representative national governments. The prison, an alien institution in much of Africa, which, moreover, in colonial days may have contained popular political leaders, does not confer on its inmates the stigma which is an important punitive aspect of imprisonment elsewhere.2 Most African governments are seriously concerned to combat crime: partly because many forms of crime are inimical to nation-building and economic development, but partly too from idealistic determinations to cleanse national life.