>...Unions can thus lobby for higher wages or more officers without lobbing for more prisoners.

Rather than coming up with hypotheticals of how you think they could operate, it is more useful to look at what they did:

>...many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.”

I don't know where private prisons spend their lobbying money, but in terms of a hypothetical private prison, they have such a small percentage of prisons, the best return for their money would probably be to lobby for privatization and bidding against government prisons. The only thing we really do know is that industry spends less nationally than the prison guard union in CA alone spends on lobbying. The prison problems in CA can't be blamed on private prisons and trying to do so is simple deflection.

>...Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE.

Yes health/safety issues are the things they should lobby for, the issue that they have so much money, they also lobby for lots of things they shouldn't be involved with.

>Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum:

Well there has been a backlash against public sector unions in Wisconsin and one group of prison guards has decided to leave AFSCME and form a new union with supposedly less interest in electoral politics. That doesn't tell us much about how much influence they had before this point.

>PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality.

Not really. Private prisons first started around 1987 and have a slow growth in the number of prisoners compared to public prisons. The last 10 years have been stagnant with little growth.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/private_prison_growth_to...

It is clear though that claiming that prison guard unions
"simply operate at a order of magnitude smaller scale." is simply wrong.

With the way they are currently regulated, it isn't clear if private prisons are much better than state run prisons, but to focus on them and ignore law enforcement public sector unions is a deflection.

The current system is broken though. Those of us who care about prison reform, also care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles.

>...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betti...

After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corco...