I can't remember what book I read it in, possibly The Gulag Archipelago, where the prisoners were made to dig large holes at one side of a field and then transport the dirt from the hole to the other side of the field.
Once the hole was deemed to have been dug well enough, they carted the dirt back from the other side of the field to fill up the hole. Then the process would start on the opposite side of the field.
Your idea sounds like it operates off of the same spirit. I like it.
Way back when, in the 1920s, my grandfather was enrolled at Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee. It's been gone for decades, but at the time, it was a somewhat prestigious school to attend. This was back in the day when getting into a military academy was generally considered an honor, but some parents would use their wealth/influence to force their sons into military academies to straighten them out for bad behavior. My grandfather was the former, but he knew more than one who was in the latter camp.
Among the punishments handed out for bad behavior was "walking the pole" which was literally assigning a cadet to march in a square around the flagpole for hours at a time, full uniform, carrying a "rifle," which was a mock-up of an old Enfield, but made of hickory so that it weighed about eighteen pounds. Anyone who thinks that this was a minor punishment has never worn a full wool uniform and carried a heavy rifle while marching, square-corners, for eight hours on an August day in middle Tennessee, when the temperatures could easily surpass 90 degrees. My grandfather managed to get that punishment a time or two.
Another punishment was to make a cadet dig a hole 6' in diameter and 6' deep, and if their infraction was particularly bad, they had to then fill that hole back up again. My grandfather never got this treatment, but he knew a few who did. Some even got "sentenced" to multiple holes.
Someone who lived in the same dormitory as my grandfather got sentenced to two holes for some particularly egregious breach of decorum. IIRC, he was caught out carousing with local girls after curfew or something. Doesn't really matter: he got sentenced to the holes and he had to dig them.
What the upperclassmen at Castle Heights didn't know is that this particular cadet's father was a demolitions expert. His father had worked on some of the biggest projects in the world, including the Panama Canal, and he knew pretty much everything that there was to know about dynamite and black powder and such at that time. And he had taught his son everything that he knew. And remember that back then, anyone could buy dynamite or black powder at their corner hardware store, no questions asked. So our punished cadet did just that.
The upperclassmen were certain that it would take this cadet probably eight or ten hours of hard digging to get these holes dug, so they put him out in the field with a shovel and went off to play football or something. After an hour or two, the campus was rocked with a series of booms. The cadet had dug down just enough to plant a couple of sticks of dynamite and a little bit of black powder, just right to blast out two holes mostly perfect for the specified six feet deep and six feet in diameter.
The upperclassmen were, predictably, furious beyond words, but the cadet had the presence of mind to demand, under threat of courts-martial (well, the military school equivalent at the time, anyway, but the upperclassmen could have been in deep doo-doo if they were found to have violated the honor of their punishment), that the commandant approve that he had indeed met the specified requirement of the punishment, to produce two holes of the specified diameter and depth. The commandant did go to the field where he had done this and chuckled a bit and told the upperclassmen to go stick it where the sun didn't shine.
That guy, as I understand it, went on to be an EOD expert in the Marines and served in both the Pacific Theatre and later in Korea.
