I have utmost respect for this guy, after spending 25 years in prison he still has such a positive outlook, thinking about how he can utilize the internet to his advantage. It teaches us something about not giving up our future even if the present is less than stellar. Startups are hard, but imagine if you would have to wait 25 years to realize your ideas... As cliché as it is, never give up!
25 years is an enormous amount of time. Think of the cost to society to lock up people for the bigger part of their productive life.
As a purely hypothetical argument, there's a net benefit to society if someone's productive efforts go into stealing from or otherwise harming other people. How many people fall into that category versus how many can be reformed or otherwise kept from causing harm is something I don't have facts about and is probably another debate for another site.