In February 1938, the governor of Cairo’ Abd al-Salam al-Shazli Pasha, launched a project establishing agricultural farms to provide youth with opportunities for vocational training. Two months later, he announced his intention to use those farms to house Awlad al-Shawari ‘, “delinquent homeless children” in the capital city. The governor was responding to intensive press reports about the Awlad al-Shawari ‘, a newly minted term expressing a panic about the presence of poor children roaming streets and hanging out around cafes, theaters, and other urban spaces in the capital city. For one week between the 11th and 18th of July that year, police forces in Cairo randomly arrested children roaming urban streets without adult companionship. Without properly investigating each child case, authorities labeled those children as homeless, delinquent, and potentially threatening public order. Thus, the police sent them to those agricultural labor camps to house and teach them “useful vocations.” When overcrowded farms or labor camps failed to absorb many arrested children, authorities sent them to odd places such as adult disabled orphanages. According to a contemporary observant, neither labor camps nor orphanages provided social services to children traumatized by the incarceration and facing different forms of abuse. Eventually, the governor formed committees of social workers to review children’s cases and decide how to release authorities from their burdening problem. The committees found out that most children had lived with their families, i.e., not homeless, and had committed any wrongdoing except they were poor. Eventually, the committees recommended reuniting children with their families. My presentation offers a micro-history of this incident as part of a larger project of the social history of childhood in modern Egypt: 1883-1995. Through this episode of incarcerating children in labor camps in 1938, which authorities also repeated in 1944, I study how the state used children’s incarceration as a tool in managing poverty, urbanization, and public order. I examine how state officials criminalized the poor as a way to face the acute problem of widespread poverty caused by changes in the economic structure, concentration of wealth, intensive immigration from rural to urban areas, and wartime socioeconomic hardship. I argue that the state approached poor children as a potential threat and also as a promising opportunity for free labor. The paper employs various sources, including government documents, memoirs, and periodicals.