State Prison at Charlestown, Mass.—
The earnings of the inmates of the Charlestown State Prison, for the year ending September 30th, 1852, were $6,921.17 over expenses. Of the inmates, 313 are Americans, 170 foreigners, 35 negroes and 12 mulattoes.
We have known a succession of annual reports of State prisons to be published, in which the earnings of the convicts, over and above the expenditures were quite “showy,” but by and by came a change in the administration, and a balance appears against the concern, sufficient to swallow up all the previously reported excess of earnings. Each report of a favorable year made its impression on the public mind, and hundreds of thousands who were misled by it, will never see a notice of the detection of the error,—to use no harsher term. We do not mean to intimate that there is any reason to distrust the foregoing item, but simply to admonish the reader that such statements are always to be taken with many grains of allowance.