To improve the prison, Brubaker fires his crooked bookkeeper, who built up a stash of illicit food ostensibly for inmates but actually sold to generate profit, tosses the former prison doctor out of the facility when he learns inmates were being charged for medical treatment, and burns down an illicit pleasure shack on prison grounds where influential trusty Huey Rauch and his girlfriend Carol lived. After a faulty roof cave-in in the prison barracks, Brubaker meets with C.P. Woodward, a lumber salesman and longtime participant in the prison graft scheme. Accusing Woodward of using prisoners as slave labor and purposely pocketing contract money while intentionally building a shoddy, uninsured roof, Brubaker terminates Woodward's contract. He also oversees the formation of an inmate council, allowing the inmates to govern themselves. During the first meeting of the inmate council, Abraham Cook, an elderly black inmate still imprisoned three years after the end of his sentence, pulls Brubaker aside and confesses that he was instructed to construct coffins for murdered prisoners. Eddie Caldwell, a sadistic trustee, takes notice, and he, Purcell, and Rauch lure Abraham to the medical ward, where he is tortured with a Tucker Telephone. Brubaker attends the prison board meeting, where he discovers that many of the members are enraged at the disruption of their graft schemes via his reforms and are uninterested at investing any money to improve the prison. Brubaker accuses prison board head John Deach of defrauding the prison through insurance policies on nonexistent farm equipment (while leaving the prison buildings uninsured) before storming out of the meeting.