Section 71. At least once each month all money received from the sale of products, by-products, or services of committed offenders shall be credited on the books of the commonwealth to a fund to be known as the Correctional Employment Fund. Subject to appropriation the commissioner may employ such fund to defray operating expenses of employment programs, including cost of materials, supplies, and equipment, maintenance of industrial facilities and compensation to committed offenders gainfully employed.

At the end of each fiscal year the unexpended balance remaining in the correctional employment fund of the state correctional facilities shall be transferred to the General Fund. At least once in each month the receipts from the labor of committed offenders in county correctional facilities and from charges for services rendered by a sheriff, superintendents and deputy superintendents of a county correctional facility to persons visiting such a facility shall be paid to the county. So much thereof as is necessary to pay the expenses of maintaining the industries in said county correctional facilities shall be expended from the county treasury for that purpose, but not until schedules of such expenses have been sworn to by the administrator and approved by the commissioner. Whenever, in the opinion of the administrator of a county correctional facility and the county commissioners and county treasurer, the accumulated funds in the county treasury from the receipts from the labor of committed offenders in county correctional facilities exceed the sums necessary to pay the expenses of maintaining the industries by which they were produced, the administrator of a county correctional facility and the county commissioners and the county treasurer shall direct that the surplus shall be transferred into the general revenue of the county. The administrator of a county correctional facility shall, as often as he has in his possession money to the amount of five thousand dollars received from the labor of committed offenders in such county correctional facility, pay it into the county treasury.