Blog 2: When Private Isn't Better

Blog 2: Prisons, Colleges, and the Private-Sector Delusion

In the article “Prisons, Colleges, and the Private-Sector Delusion,” posted at The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot calls into question the efficiency and morality of privatization for specific public industries/services. She initially reminds the reader that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party have expressed support for the idea of privatization. She then goes on in detail to challenge and discredit the wisdom of privatization by pointing out to the flaws and shortcomings of private colleges and prisons. By comparing private institutions to public ones, she concludes that privatization is frequently unjust and not democratic.

I like this article because it’s a very old, interesting, and current political divide in American politics. Also the fact that private prisons exist frustrates me because of the obvious conflict of interest. Reading this article about how messed up it is that there are people out there making a profit out of peoples prison convictions made me want to analyze it.

Rhetorical Strategies:

Emotion (ethos): The writer uses this quote from an admissions officers’  affidavit to illustrate how someone might get recruited to a private college “feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their “reasons” to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative.” This makes the reader feel sympathy for the college student

Logic (logos): By citing a 2011 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research she reports that students who attend for-profit colleges “have more of a debt burden, were more likely to default on their loans, and were less likely to be employed than students who’d gone to nonprofit institutions.”

Figurative Language (Simile): Talbot compares private prisons in Louisiana to motels by saying that “run by local sheriff’s and private prison companies Both have a financial incentive to keep the prisons full--- like hotels, prisons in Louisiana don’t want vacancies. “

Imagery: She uses imagery by quoting Chang in order to paint a picture of what it’s like and the frustrating experience to be in state prison in Louisiana where all you do is waste your life.  “Odds are you will be placed in a prison in a low-budget, for-profit enterprise, where you are likely to languish your bunk, day after day, year after year bored out of your skill with little chance to learn a trade or otherwise improve yourself.”

Ethic (ethos) - The way ethic is presented is by assuming that the average citizen might want “a lower incarceration rate, less draconian drug laws, and programs that train inmates for re-entry to society or oblige them to work” but that these for profit companies are standing in the way of reform policies through their lobbying and advertising influence.