This read to me like Stockholm Syndrome more than anything. I've spent time in a similar environment, and there is a unique bond you form amongst the people around you. But I think the author takes it a little too far when he starts projecting his outside experience onto his fellow inmates, and all but bestowing them with the entrepreneurial instincts of Marc Andreessen.

Yes prison sucks, with prisoners becoming better prisoners. But there are a lot of genuinely bad people in prison that belong there, and not on the outside starting companies and exploring there entrepreneurial lust.

This is why it is the criminal justice system, not prisons, that is at crisis point. Instead of decarceration the author pleads, we need to focus attention on making sure that less people end up inside in the first place.