Richard Hume

Richard Hume is a senior administrator at Hatch State Hospital and chair of the Security Board hearing that committed Thomas Birdsey. He first appears as a courteous institutional gatekeeper, declining Dominick Birdsey’s request for an independent HIV test on administrative grounds. A confidential memo later reveals a darker dimension to that authority: Hume privately considers whether the public might accept HIV statistics as a means of eliminating people deemed expendable. The contrast between his public assurances about family participation in treatment and his private language makes him one of the clearest embodiments of Hatch’s moral failure.

Institutional authority and the test request

Hume occupies a high rung in Hatch’s chain of command. Dominick places him above the immediate supervisors involved in Thomas’s care and identifies him as the official who chaired the Security Board hearing that sentenced his brother. This gives Hume’s phone call more than administrative weight: he has participated in the process governing Thomas’s liberty and now speaks for the institution controlling his treatment.

When Hume calls Dominick, he adopts an easy, companionable manner, as though they were acquaintances meeting at the Elks Lodge. He says he is glad Dominick raised his concerns with Lisa Sheffer and invokes Hatch’s mission statement, which describes inmates’ families as integral to the treatment team. But when the subject turns to testing Thomas for HIV, Hume says the request is unwarranted at that time. He explains that the Institute tests patients periodically according to its own schedule, then argues that an individual test would not be cost-effective and could establish an undesirable precedent. The language of inclusion therefore has a limit: the family may be part of the team, but Hume retains the authority to decide when its concerns count.

Dominick refuses to let the discussion remain abstract. He offers to pay for the test and insists that it be performed by someone outside the hospital payroll. When Hume asks about the photographs Dominick has mentioned to Lisa Sheffer, Dominick explains that a guard kneed him in the groin the night he checked Thomas in. He says he photographed the bruising and swelling, obtained an examination the following day, and had witnesses to the assault. Dominick links the accusation to the atmosphere surrounding the recent events in Los Angeles, hoping the prospect of public scrutiny will persuade Hume to authorize testing. The exchange places a specific allegation of violence beside Hume’s procedural refusal, though Hume’s own knowledge of the photographs remains uncertain to Dominick.

The confidential memorandum

The portrait changes when Dominick finds a paper in the sun visor of his Escort after visiting Thomas. It is a memo from Hume to Dr. Hervé Garcia, stamped confidential. Dominick reads it as evidence that Hume’s professional role and public manner conceal a profound cynicism. In the memo, Hume advises against Hatch’s publicizing its HIV numbers to Hartford, then speculates that ordinary citizens might quietly approve of those numbers if they were released because they would represent the weeding out of the population through AIDS.

The memo does not establish that Hume caused the HIV infections or that he acted on the sentiment it records. Its force lies in what it discloses about his private framing of them: patients’ suffering can be imagined as a socially acceptable process of elimination. Dominick connects this thinking to Mr. LoPresto’s doctrine of Social Darwinism and begins to understand why Ralph Drinkwater may have wanted the memo brought to light. The document turns the dispute over one patient’s test into a confrontation with the values that Hume’s institution may conceal behind its official language.

Exposure and confrontation

Dominick sees the memo as a possible key to getting Thomas out of Hatch. The image of a key gives the document an immediate practical purpose in his struggle, but the evidence also carries a larger irony: Hume’s own confidential words may unlock the authority he has used to refuse Dominick’s request. The memo reaches Dominick through the chain of events he associates with Ralph, and its discovery redirects his effort from persuasion to leverage.

Later, Dominick and Leo Blood confront Hume in person. Hume is speaking with two Yale men when Leo introduces Dominick; Hume’s smile drops, and he sends the visitors inside to order him a drink. He scans the memo, scowls, and tears it up, letting the pieces drift in the breeze off Long Island Sound. Leo immediately tells him that they have plenty of copies. Hume’s gesture tries to destroy the evidence in front of its holders, but the copies make the act futile; the attempt to control the record becomes part of the confrontation itself. Hume then asks what they want, including whether they are after money. The available scene ends with that question, leaving the result of the pressure unresolved.

Character and narrative significance

Hume is drawn through a sharp reversal rather than an extended personal history. His initial performance of collegial concern depends on institutional phrases—family involvement, treatment schedules, cost, precedent—while the memo exposes a private calculus that treats patients’ deaths as potentially useful statistics. Neither side erases the other: the personable administrator is also the author of the confidential speculation, and the gap between the two is precisely what Dominick’s discovery makes visible.

The episode also shows how authority is challenged in the novel. Dominick cannot command Hatch to test Thomas, so he offers payment, invokes an assault witnessed and documented outside the institution, and finally uses a copied memo as leverage. Hume’s rank gives him the power to defer the request; it does not give him control over every copy of his own words. By the confrontation at Long Island Sound, his attempt to tear up the memo has become a revealing action in itself: the administrator who spoke of precedent and public policy is confronted with a record that can travel beyond his office.