This podcast is an inside look at what it really is like to do time in a maximum security prison in New York. 

SEASON 1 : BOSS

Released just weeks ago, season 1 host, “Boss”, served 41 years for murder, most of them as a “shot caller” presiding over a faction of the convict-run shadow government that effectively runs the prisons.  

The season’s pulse is Boss’s own stories, told in a raw, no-holds-barred, tell-it-like it is style, from his initiation as a 20-year-old kid, through his rise to prison royalty, and all the stops along the way.  Providing depth and color, and their own perspectives, are guests who touched Boss and the penal system through which he navigated, including current and former inmates, corrections officers, and parole officers.  Boss served time in all of New York’s toughest prisons and rubbed shoulders with many of its most notorious criminals, including David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), “Ronnie” DeFeo (of “Amityville Horror” fame), “Bobby” Chambers (“the Preppy Killer”), “Mad Dog Sully”, and Jack Henry Abbott (Normal Mailer’s pen pal who wrote “In the Belly of the Beast”).

Episodes focus on fascinating (and little known) corners of prison life, and each episode opens with a riveting true story, and ends with realtime update on Boss’s status as he works to reintegrate into a world that is barely recognizable to him.

Through it all, the listener experiences life as it really was for Boss and his fellow convicts: the daily dehumanization and the brotherhood formed among inmates, and the grinding monotony punctuated both by gut-wrenching and brutal horrors and antics designed to maintain sanity and pass the TIME. 

PRODUCER : PAULA PARRISH

Paula is a photographer, filmmaker, and human rights advocate. She started her career in entertainment in the 1990s when she moved from her hometown in Wisconsin to Los Angeles and found work both in front of and behind the camera. In 2003, Paula moved to NYC to attend the School of Visual Arts and from there built a career as a still photographer and videographer, producing and shooting commercials, music videos, and shooting for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She was a photo editor for Details Magazine when the magazine folded.

Seeing an opportunity for a shift into a more socially impactful career, Paula became part of the screening/review committees for the Human Rights Watch and DOC NYC Film Festivals and also began volunteering at the NY Innocence Project. Since early 2017 she has been shooting a documentary film about prosecutorial misconduct in NY in the 1970s and 1980s, which will be her directorial debut. This podcast was born out of relationships that Paula has forged over the course of that project.