Some of the changes in the construction and perception of children and childhood in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were in response to and a part of the modernization process that had started even before the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Efforts to create colonial or national cultures commonly involved legislations, educational projects and health care policies in which it is imagined that the identities of children may be formed and which in turn institutionalized and sustained a certain perception and discourse on childhood. Furthermore, modernizers tended to regard, at least discursively, the handling of children by society, in the broadest sense, as a benchmark in the progress of modernization and civilization. Therefore, while they were striving to invent/define the normal, or rather ideal, child, they were also preoccupied with the abnormal, the anomaly: the juvenile delinquent. Towards the end of the 19th century, as the Egyptian state became the parens patriae, juvenile delinquency became one of the problems faced by the modern state and the colonial administration. Placing children in special institutions was part of an effort to ensure the cohesion of the community in new and changing circumstances. The result was a conceptual integration of delinquent and deprived children and extending the jurisdiction of the courts to include destitute, neglected or uncontrollable children. Using the Foucauldian notions of discipline, bio-power and governmentality, my presentation aims at tracing the new form of incarcerating institution as represented by the Islahiyya, the borstal, which was a mix of a quasi-military juvenile prison and vocational/ industrial school. Assessment of the success or failure of such an institution to produce governable citizens/ subjects is irrelevant. What is relevant here is how it served to enforce the middle-class values of the nascent nationalist movement, and used simultaneously as an example of “law and order”, serving the colonial propaganda.