Generally you're going to find very, very, very few people that are willing to have a facts based conversation on the topic. The popular narrative is to pretend that private prisons have driven the population boom - having a single digit share of the total prison population 15 years ago - despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly the government prison system and government employees that pocketed all that money the last 40 years.
Anyone here want to run rough numbers on how much combined income the millions of government prison and related workers derived in the last 40 years? Or tally how many millions of government jobs were created over the decades by politicians by putting millions of people into government prisons (and keeping them there)? It's trillions of dollars that the government has paid to its own workers, between the government employees putting prisoners there, and the government employees that keep them there. Accordingly, nobody could possibly have a larger vested interest in the prison boom than the government.