I don't think this is really an issue at all concerning possibly severe levels of punishment for hard core, violent, career criminals. Is spending 8 hours a day breaking rocks or digging ditches a good deterrent for violent criminals?
Even in firefighting, in some situations you may need to use fire to actually stop a larger fire from spreading where you don't want it to.
And simply standing around passively and letting some sort of violence happen to you without bothering to fight back is a fools errand, and would probably get you injured or killed. You also clearly aren't going to approach a rabid, mad dog that's fixing to attack you and expect to be treated with fairness and kindness just because that's your philosophy in life, either.
If someone hates you for reasons you can't understand and pushes you into the mud, you have a mud fight on your hands, and all your happy thoughts about clean water and clothes pretty much go out the window at that point.