Water shutoffs, social reproduction, and the carceral state: Policing life's work through the weaponization of water

Abstract

Water service shutoffs have emerged as a vital “tool” in the arsenal of neoliberal utility governance in the USA. Against the backdrop of a restructured US welfare state—from a Keynesian model to the anti-state—this article introduces the water shutoff as a prism to examine the deep extension of carceral power into the sphere of social reproduction. Through an investigation of shutoff practices in US cities, the article finds that access to safe and secure running water is increasingly weaponized as a “police structure” to preserve a model of debt-driven water management, in ways that also produce a spatial and racial division of nature. The study finds that water shutoffs function as the evictions of the water world: a displacement and dispossession of basic needs masquerading under a “neutral” market logic. Policing water debt through shutoffs maintains powerful leverage over households; its ubiquity in US water management allows shutoffs to hide as a technical necessity even as it ticks over the human revenue stream. In spite of a temporary ban of water shutoffs by US states and cities, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and government efforts to support household reproduction, this article notes the return of shutoffs and their improved capacity to create inroads for accumulation on the back of life's work (and debts). The article concludes by discussing the conundrum of the welfare state and social infrastructures that sits at the heart of our political struggles over social reproduction.