This guy is dangerously naive. He seems to think (with ardent passion) that regimes in the middle east fell because "Twitter made that happen."
Okay, sir. Time to settle down and reel that nonsense back in.
He speaks emotionally about things that aren't necessarily tethered to reality and his facts aren't precise, and maybe he has the amnesia of a politician.
His message is that prisons are bad, and that we should rethink the manner of punishment we exact on people. His passion is very obviously motivated by personal experience, and that doesn't invalidate his message. Essentially, I agree with him. But. I'm not drinking his kool-ade about "OMG INTERNETZ."
Yes, I'll entertain his notions about prison being an inefficient and destructive practice that mostly leaves inmates as damaged wrecks, and possibly transforms many into more terrible criminals than they might've been without jail time. But I'm going to take his message with a grain of salt.
When I say dangerous, I mean it. He is too new to the internet, to extoll its virtues. In the same talk in which he absolutely RAILS against the privatization of prisons (which is an evil all its own, and yeah I'll agree with his points on that) his next words advocate just haphazardly dumping absolutely anything into the hands of large, corporate, profit-driven nigh-monopolies like Facebook. There's a cognitive dissonance in those two concepts that he very obviously hasn't thought deeply about (and to be fair, maybe he hasn't been given the time yet).
Which is surprising, I might add, considering that he's a man who had his mail read by prison staff, his phone calls monitored, and was displaced across 19 prisons during his time served.
He needs to acclimate himself with some of the debacles of the recent internet over the past 5 years in particular, and maybe familiarize himself with personalities like Julian Assange. If he can bring himself to understand certain realities about the internet, and how it can enable evil as well as good, maybe he wouldn't be so quick to proclaim that it's some kind of universal salve, which can cure all our ills.