Big Mouth|Former Jangheung Prison — Gucheon Kept Its Cells in Jeollanam-do

The prison in Big Mouth is called Gucheon. The walls are in Jangheung. From 1975 to 2014 this was a working correctional facility at Wondo-ri. After the inmates moved to a new building in Yongsan-myeon, the empty cells became the most used prison set in Korean film, and Park Chang-ho's framed life was shot inside them.

Bars that once locked real men now lock a lawyer who has to become Big Mouse in order to stay alive. Other series have walked the same corridors — Prison Playbook, The Glory, Mouse — but this plot lives here for sixteen episodes. The county bought the site, kept the original cellblocks, and in 2025 opened it to the public as Papillon Zip, an archive, writing room, and overnight stay built from the same concrete.

You can stand in a visiting room that still looks like a visiting room. You can read the annual reports in the old complaints office. The pilgrimage is not nostalgia for punishment. It is the recognition that the drama needed a prison that had already been a prison, because a studio wall would have told the wrong kind of lie. The town around it is ordinary Jeollanam-do. The gate is the part that still knows how to close.