This paper examines state policies and responses towards problematic and unruly youth and the concomitant development of the category of juvenile delinquency in Hashemite Iraq (1921-1958). It argues that so-called delinquent youth gained the interest of state officials when their revolutionary potential was recognized in the aftermath of large scales protests in the 1940s and 1950s against perceived undemocratic features of the Iraqi state. In other words, as the Hashemite Iraqi state recognized the revolutionary and defiant potential of its lumpenproletariat, it began to clearly define social, medical, and legal counter-policies which were incorporated into its larger social-engineering projects at a time when increased social unrest threatened the hegemony of the state and its ruling elite. With regards to juvenile delinquency, these policies manifested in separate and novel legal categories as well as in a quasi-separate prison system with a heavy focus on re-education and rehabilitation. Weaved out of moralism and governmentality, policies towards the management of juvenile delinquents coincided with nation-building, social engineering, and reformation endeavours that attempted to impact and mold all aspects of daily life in Iraq, specifically among the youth. The implementation of these new categories and measures was seen by those in power as well as by British observers as a sign of Iraqi modernity and progress. By engaging with sources ranging from Iraqi and British newspapers, memoirs, travel accounts, medical journals, legal texts, and Iraqi prose, this paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship on youth and criminality, civil society, governmentality, and welfare state formation in the Middle East. Simultaneously, it covers new ground by zooming in on a segment of the Iraqi population, namely the uneducated and mostly politically unaffiliated criminal youth from the lowest echelons of Iraqi society. These actors have often been overlooked or overshadowed by the dominant focus on the Iraqi effendiyya and other stakeholders in the modern Iraqi state project. Put differently, in telling the story of iraq’s problematic youth, this paper draws on Fanon’s notion of the lumpenproletariat to showcase an understudied and overlooked segment of the Iraq’s population in the first half of the twentieth century.