[A Study on the Current Status and Improvement Plans of the Privately-operated Prison in Korea] Somang Prison， the first privately-operated prison in Korea， has established and opens the door in 2010. It attracted a high attention from our society including academia when it was open. However， there have been very few people who interested in its real operation after its opening. The purpose of this paper was to raise issues related with the operation of the prison and to propose desirable instructions through visiting the prison and examining its actual operation status. Currently Somang Prison has 120 operation staffs while it has 298 prisoners as of August 8， 2011 with the maximum capacity of 380. The first problem was that it doesn’t have the proper legal regulations related with establishment of the privately-operated prison and selection of prisoners in it. The second was that it doesn’t have proper funding for its operation because the operation is highly dependent on the government budget. In order to solve these issues， the relevant policy for the operation of the privately-operated prison should be established before everything else. Based on the new policy， the inadequate regulations have to be sorted out properly and the government supports have to be reinforced.