The terms of good living, a preventive measure present in the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1832, were drawn up as an instrument of the law intended to prevent crime. People accused of drunkenness, vagrancy, and disturbance of order signed a commitment at the police stations, from that occurrence on, to live well in communion with the law, and appeared in the periodic press sheets as idle suspects. The emancipation legislation and the crisis of the slave order, especially from the 1870s on, point to the strengthening of the terms of good living as a mechanism of coercion to work. Used as a tool to combat idleness, the preventive measure became part of the effort to construct new definitions of occupation and, also, of imprisonment, in face of the end of the legitimate form of coercion to work: slavery. This dissertation aims to analyze the construction of the elements of suspicion around the people policed by terms of good living, in order to think the combat against idleness and compulsory labor as part of the logic of the State of the Second Reign. In order to broaden studies of idleness in the nineteenth century, it is important to examine the implications of police control through the terms of good living in the experience of informal workers.