To the Minister for the Interior, Francesco Crispi

E VI, 2717

List of locations in Rome that could be useful to the Salesians — reminder on the preventive system in the education of youth

Rome, 21 February 1878

Your Excellency,

I have the honour of presenting to Your Excellency the principles on which the preventive system as applied to young people at risk on public streets or in homes and educational institutions can be regulated.

At the same time, eager to support the good intentions expressed by Your Excellency, I have taken the liberty of naming a few locations in Rome that may be suitable for this purpose and which are under the same Government. These places would be:

1. The building and courtyard next to the parish church of St Bernard occupied by the Military Command of the 20th Cavalry Regiment, which they say must be moved elsewhere. In the type that I am attaching, it is indicated with the colour green. Having received this building from the government, Marquis Berardi ceded that portion of land that might be needed for the development of this pious project.

2. Building, courtyard of the renowned institute of S. Michele in Ripa.

3. Building and site previously occupied by the Franciscans, known as the Convent for Foreign Missions. It is located between the Quattro Fontane and St Mary Major.

4. S. Caio with land and houses nearby the crossroads of the Quattro Fontane.

5. Convent of St Agatha, formerly inhabited by the Religious Doctrinaires in Trastevere.

6. S. Nicola dei Cesarini house and courtyard formerly inhabited by the Carmelites. It is in the Piazza by the same name.

Whichever of these premises the Government wishes to place at my disposal, I would allocate exclusively to poor and at risk children, and I am confident that this can be done with little disruption to the Government’s finances.

This would provide for a large number of poor children who are asking to be admitted, and would also put an end to the serious and costly inconvenience of sending large numbers of children from this city to the hospices in Turin and S. Pierdarena.

With complete trust and deep gratitude, I pray to God to keep you safe, and I profess myself

Your Excellency’s

Fr John Bosco

The preventive system in the education of youth

There are two systems used in the moral and civic education of young people: repressive and preventive. Both are applicable in civil society and in educational institutions.

We will briefly outline the preventive system to be used in civil society, and then how it can be successfully implemented in prisons, colleges, hospices and educational institutions.

Preventive and repressive systems in society

The repressive system consists of making the laws and the penalties they establish known; the authorities must then ensure that offenders are identified and punished. This is the system used in the military and generally among adults. But young people, lacking education and reflection, stirred up by their peers or by thoughtlessness, often allow themselves to be blindly dragged into disorder for the sole reason that they have been abandoned.

While laws watch over the guilty, great care must certainly be taken to reduce their numbers.

Which children should be considered at risk? I believe that those who are not bad but are at risk of becoming so. Such are:

1. Those from cities or different regions of the country travelling to other cities and regions in search of work. Most of them bring a little money with them, which they spend quickly. If they cannot find work soon, they are in real danger of turning to petty theft and starting down a path that will lead them to ruin.

2. Those who, having lost their parents, have no one to care for them, and are therefore left to wander and fall into bad company, when a helping hand or a kind word could have set them on the path to honour and upright citizenship.

3. Those whose parents are unable or unwilling to take care of their children; therefore, they expel them from the family or abandon them completely. Unfortunately, there are many such unnatural parents.

4. Vagrants who fall into the hands of the public security authorities but are not yet troublemakers. If these individuals were accepted into a hospice where they could be educated and introduced to work, they would certainly be removed from prison and returned to civil society.

Measures to take

Experience has shown that these four categories of children can be effectively cared for:

1. With Sunday playgrounds. With pleasant recreation, music, gymnastics, running, jumping, recitation and theatre, they gather together very easily. With evening classes, Sunday school and catechism, these poor children of the people are given the moral nourishment that is proportionate and indispensable to them.

2. During these gatherings, investigate who is without an employer and ensure that they are employed and assisted in their work throughout the week.

3. Then there are those who are poor and abandoned, having neither clothes to wear, nor food to eat, nor a place to sleep at night. These can only be cared for in hospices and shelters, through arts and crafts, and even through agricultural colonies.

Government involvement

Without taking on any administrative tasks and without compromising the principle of legal charity, the Government can cooperate in the following ways:

1. Provide recreation areas for Sunday enjoyment, help to furnish schools and recreation areas with the necessary equipment.

2° Provide premises for hospices, equipping them with the necessary tools for the arts and crafts to which the children admitted would be assigned.

3. The Government would allow free admission of students, but would provide a daily allowance or monthly subsidy for those who were admitted given that they were in the circumstances described above.

This would be verified either by certificates issued by the civil authorities or by the police, who frequently encounter young people in this situation.

This daily allowance would be limited to one third of what it would cost to keep a young person in a state reformatory.

Taking the correctional prisons of the Turin Generala as a basis, and reducing the total expenditure for each individual, it can be calculated at 80 cents per day. In this way the government would help, but would leave room for private charity from citizens.

Results

Based on thirty-five years of experience, it can be said that:

1. Many young people released from prison easily took up a skill with which to earn an honest living.

2. Many who were in extreme danger of becoming wayward began to cause trouble to honest citizens and were already causing considerable disturbance to the public authorities. These individuals withdrew from danger and set themselves on the path of upright citizenship.

3. Records show that no fewer than one hundred thousand young people were assisted, gathered and educated through this system, learning music, literature, art or crafts, and becoming skilled artisans, shop assistants, master craftsmen, teachers, hard-working employees, and quite a few holding honourable ranks in the military. Many, endowed by nature with extraordinary intelligence, were able to attend university and graduate in literature, mathematics, medicine, law, engineering, as notaries, pharmacists and the like.