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In this article, I intend to reflect on "the problem of youth" as it was presented during my ethnography. From a question about politics, I got interested in the urbanization of a shantytown in La Matanza considered an emblem of urban policies during the Kirchner governments. The "problem of youth" became important to me because it mattered to my interlocutors in the neighborhood. In this article, I try to show how different relationships between the population and the State are intertwined in the elaboration of this problem. It is a way of responding to both the views that focus only on the prison State and those that focus exclusively on the redistribution policies of a populist State, to investigate how different State policies are appropriated by different local actors, responding to (and reinforcing) social heterogeneities in a context of persistent instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]