He is using a drawl so the reader can picture the literary technique used in the story.
No a noun is before the preposuitional phrase for example in this sentence__ Joe rode his bike to get home. The noun is joe and the prepostional phrase is to get home.
This sentence basically means that an explanation to the problem was the costs of prisons and the recession in the U.S during the times of December 2007 through June 2009.
Answer:
A noun phrase, or nominal, is a phrase that has a noun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type
Example:
Examples of noun phrase as direct object: I want a skate board. Should we buy the yellow house? Examples of noun phrase as object of preposition: Jeff rode on a skate board. Karen lives in the yellow house.