Mencken on Crime and Punishment—

“But what better offers? Something enormously better. The simple device, in brief, of condemning the detected pickpocket to lose the third phalange of the index finger of his right hand—a quick, safe, wholly painless operation, almost as easy as having a boil lanced. And yet quite as certain in its effects as life imprisonment. The pickpocket is not appreciably mutilated. The loss of that one phalange does not show itself. He is fit for almost any honest work that can be imagined. But he can no more pick a pocket, with the chief of his highly trained tools gone, than a fiddler, in like case, could play a cadenza. All of his special capacity for crime is gone, and with it his special temptation is gone, too. At every other variety of felony he is as much an amateur and blunderer as the judge on the bench.”

• H. L. Mencken, Chrestomathy

One appreciates the creativity but in practice it could be a little dicey . . .