"What the law designated as crime were the forms of life created by young black women in the city. The modes of intimacy and affiliation being fash ioned in the ghetto, the refusal to labor, the forms of gathering and assem bly, the practices of subsistence and getting over were under surveillance and targeted by the police as well as the sociologists and the reformers who gathered the information and made the case against them, forging their lives into tragic biographies of poverty, crime, and pathology."