> 2. Private prison lobbyist
That should say: government prison lobbyists. See: how government police & prison lobby groups have fought against pot legalization for decades. They have far more money and influence than the private prison industry (and that was 10x more the case 10+ years ago, when the private prison industry was hardly more than a pebble).
Those with the most to lose from pot legalization in terms of money, are government employees. The extreme majority of all the people put in prison during the US prison boom, went into government prisons staffed by government employees, and were arrested by government employees.
The war on drugs was a government program, that benefited the government by dramatically increasing its power and scale in just about every possible way. The private prison industry was tiny before year ~2000 (and it's still a small minority of the racket, which still mostly benefits the government).
The government prison complex is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. All that profit extract goes into the pockets of the government employees (and to a lesser extent, government contractors that build prisons etc).
Show me the labor cost of all the government employees related to the prison system (including the unnecessary police/arresting-related employees) over the last 40 years, inflation adjusted. Here's a hint: it's over a trillion dollars and makes the private prison money look like a joke.
CoreCivic is worth $3 billion and does $1.8 billion in revenue. That's equivalent to the salary & benefits of about 20,000 cops. There are two million (that's 100x the size of CoreCivic) people directly or indirectly employed by the government prison system, including 1.2+ million that are employed by state & local law enforcement agencies.
The income & benefits for those two million workers that are feeding off the government prison complex, is worth at least $150+ billion per year.
Politicians also love the government prison complex. It supports their power by making sure taxes remain artificially high, which keeps their slush funds higher, and they can basically build jobs in their voting districts with government prisons.