 My name is Dr. Sumerian, and everything you think you know about D-Class is completely wrong, so let's talk about why. This is George Bradner, proud fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide. George is married to Mary. They made it in high school and have been inseparable ever since. George's life hasn't gone exactly as well as he thought it would since then, and sometimes he goes out at night with his brother and drinks a little too much. One day is his construction job when it starts to rain a bit, and his foreman doesn't want to take any chances so he sends the whole crew home. And George Bradner grabs a couple of drinks at the bar before he drives home. He sees his brother's truck in the yard. He goes inside and hears giggling from the bedroom. He goes into the garage, grabs his shotgun, walks back to the bedroom, and shoots his brother dead. Then he apologizes to his wife before driving to the police station, confessing, going to jail, getting convicted, and going to death row. Then he meets a man who gives him a ray of hope. There's this program. It's dangerous, but rewarding, and if he can do just a few experiments for just a month, he'll walk away a free man. He takes the man up on the offer and disappears from the system, and his time with the Foundation is mostly uneventful. He dodges two-three-one duty. He cleans up crap and blood in one-seven-three cell, and he helps researchers as much as he can, and at the end of the month they shoot him in the head and throw him in the incinerator. This is probably the story of the average D-class in your head, and almost everything important about it is completely wrong. So before we begin, a small caveat. A lot of what I'm gonna say here will consider morality from the standpoint of Western culture. This is not universally applicable, and I'm not making any judgments based on your own personal morality, regardless of where you live. But while I haven't done a statistical analysis of SCP articles, I think we can all agree that most Foundation sites and SCP objects are contained in the US, Canada, or Europe. So when I have to talk about Foundation scientists, I'm going to consider them to hold Western moral values, and that's for good or bad. Now that that's out of the way, though, let's talk about the ethics of D-class. See, the Foundation, in order to keep the world safe, must necessarily utilize humans to contain some SCP objects. They can't automate everything. These people will be subject to an incredibly high level of risk. Now the solution in the early days of the site was, let's utilize death row inmates to soothe the mind of the Foundation scientists in the stories who know that at times they will be sending people to their deaths and also soothe the mind of the reader. This is where D-class originated from. But there aren't enough death row inmates to go around. First of all, let's take a look at our above example. George Bradner would not be on death row at all. In the US, one of the only Western nations to have a death penalty, in order to be put to death, you have to have committed first-degree murder or it's equivalent in the state you live in. And first-degree murder is differentiated from second-degree murder in manslaughter in that it is a willful, premeditated act with malice of forethought. And malice of forethought, by the way, is just a complex way to reiterate that it was premeditated. I mean, there are some legal nuances there, but it's beyond the scope of this essay. Now George could end up with a second-degree murder conviction. He did, after all, go to the garage and get a shotgun after figuring out what was up, or a manslaughter charge depending on how good his lawyer is and where he lives. But neither of those charges carry a death penalty in any US state or on a federal level. So you might think this is an argument for the ethical nature of using D-Class, right? Because this means that D-Class are the absolute worst of the worst, the most terrible people in society sent to a bad end. Except, no, because there's simply not enough death row inmates to go around. We're going to start with worldwide numbers. Let's look at the total number of confirmed executions from 2017. Amnesty International documented 993 executions worldwide in 2017. And you might be thinking, cool, a thousand a year could be enough. And you might be right about that, but there's a problem with the source of those numbers. First of all, the top four executing countries account for 838 of the executions. And those countries in question are Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan. Rather than examine each of the four countries in detail, we'll talk about the one at the very top. Because, incidentally, it's also responsible for over half of the executions documented by Amnesty International at 507. Iran carries out the death penalty for a variety of offenses, including fornication, adultery, homosexual relations, false accusations of the last three crimes, creating pornography, drinking alcohol, theft, insulting Islam, blasphemy, drug possession in large quantities, growing marijuana, and of course murder, but only if the person didn't already deserve it. For a fully detailed listing, you can check out the International Federation for Human Rights report. I'm going to link in the description of this video. Well, who cares? The foundation is morally gray. But let's talk about the average scientist working for the foundation. Well, it's certainly possible to sublimate your ethics and opinions when the world is at risk. The world isn't always at risk. Sometimes you just need a guy to go poke something and see what happens. And when that goes sideways, you kind of need to know that what's going to happen to that guy is deserved. Otherwise, you're going to sit awake at night thinking about it. So what about that? Sometimes people have regrets, except no. That's not how the human mind works. Even people who have come to terms with the evil they commit will break down over time. You'll see higher suicide rates among the foundation's staff. You'd see people quitting out of the blue. And the brain drain on the foundation would be immense over time. And frankly, while some projects might require the kind of person who can push through all this and remain cold and dispassionate, most don't. And to put it simply, a site full of people who know that crimes against humanity are being committed on a regular basis is a site that probably won't run that smoothly. See, the trick to this is imagining that your prisoner, D-class, death row inmate, whoever it is, is a monster and or less than a person. Dehumanizing people is the only way this works. And if two-thirds of your D-class are from the Middle East or Pakistan, you're going to know something's up. And you'll also know that these people who you're sending to their deaths are likely wrongly imprisoned by your own moral standards. So then what are our other options? China might look like a great choice. They execute probably thousands of people a year. But they're not on the list for amnesty international because executions in China are considered a state secret. The numbers are likely in the thousands and you could grab from that except they run into the same moral issues we had with Iran. Executions in China are handed out for things most scientists in the West would understand to be against their own moral standards. Political dissent doesn't seem like a good reason to send someone to their death in a giant, gaping maw monster. So what else is there? Well, there is one country that has a death penalty that could align with the moral compasses of Westerners. And that country is the United States of America. Now, this is arguable because the West is not just one culture. It's comprised of a number of nations, some of which have outlawed the death penalty for a long time and some for whom the population considers the death penalty to be morally repugnant. And let's not pretend that the death penalty isn't highly controversial even in the U.S. There's problems with its fair application along racial and socioeconomic grounds. These issues mix with the wrongful convictions of several individuals who later become exonerated. But those issues are beyond the scope of this essay. We're not going to talk about the right or wrong of the death penalty. I have my own opinions, you have yours. That's not the point. The fact that there is controversy is enough to let you know that the people who are going to be carrying out these tests might not support it. Let's pretend for a moment that the U.S. death penalty is completely non-controversial and none of the scientists who work at the foundation spent their college years as activists who understand the intricate details of why it's controversial or explain it to their coworkers who then look up readily available information online about the controversy. And none of them have a background of their own. They give them an intimate understanding of the wide socioeconomic and racial disparity in the application of the death penalty in the U.S. There are still not enough of them. There are, as of this essay's release, approximately 2,714 death row inmates in the U.S. We are quickly approaching 4,000 SCP articles. And fine, you might say. Not every SCP article uses D-Class. I'd agree, but many of them do use them in huge numbers. Let's talk about one of the more famous SCPs and one that exists with an understanding that the SCP Foundation executes or at least moves D-Class out of the position at the end of every month. SCP-231 utilizes six D-Class. And these D-Class have quite stringent psychological and obedience requirements. They're also replaced at the end of every month. There are no dates on that article, so we're going to have to assume that the post date of October 3rd, 2008 is the point where the anomaly first came into containment and the containment procedures were enacted. As of this essay, there have been a total of 113 months since the article was written. Six D-Class a month means that a single SCP object has needed 678 death row inmates in just the last 10 years. Even that number isn't really doable. There might be 2,714 people on death row in the US, but the number of people actually executed in the US yearly is vanishingly small. Only 23 of the 993 worldwide executions were carried out by the US in 2017. As a comparison, SCP-231 needs 72 new D-Class every year. We do have one final option. D-Class are not death row inmates. They are people serving life sentences in the West. After doing a bit of math, I figure there are about 160,000 people in the US serving life sentences and about 33,000 people in the US right now serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. These numbers mean the US alone could provide D-Class on the scales we need to make the foundation work but still remain in the shadows. And of course, there are other Western countries where life sentences are a thing. But even with the numbers we've thrown around, it should have become readily apparent already that even when we work the statistics in such a way as to give us the numbers we need in a morally gray, not totally black manner, monthly terminations will still need to be off the table. You might ask why. I'm going to give you a few reasons. One, getting these prisoners and hiding it is hard. There's a lot of documentation of every prisoner in the US and while it's possible that a few might get lost in the shuffle naturally, it's less reasonable to lose huge numbers yearly and not have family, friends, or prison staff notice. Two, a D-Class who works on a single project can easily become an expert at dealing with that object. Expertise is different than education and it's arguably more valuable. You can only acquire experience through long-term work with the thing that you need experience for. Three, testing, training, and orientating D-Class is going to be expensive. Beyond the basic costs of acquiring them, they have to be trained in the foundation way of doing things. This is a sunk cost that you cannot get back once you lose the D-Class. A good comparison there are any number of fast food chains or retail stores. The amount of money they spend on training every year is quite substantial and this kind of cost is not going to be ignored by the foundation. And four, while there are enough people serving life sentences to probably fulfill your needs, there's not an infinite supply of prisoners. The first three reasons are potentially solvable but the last one is pretty much an absolute. There's no way to keep killing D-Class and have them be replaced forever on the scale the foundation works at without running out of people to kill. Now why is how you think about D-Class important? Well, the head canon of the average reader is going to work on some wrong-headed assumptions and that's bad but not critical. If a reader wants to go on believing things about death penalties and murderers and whatever, they can. But writers, and those are the people I'm generally talking to, should know better because it allows for better stories. An irredeemable D-Class who dies at the end of the month is not a character. It's a plot device and a fairly transparent one. George Branford, who never raised a hand to anyone in anger before or after the crime that put him away for life, is a character with history. He has regrets and he has potential for long-term character development. Now his is a cliche story and it's one with some troubling and possibly misogynistic implications of handled improperly but it's still got potential and from a story perspective I don't feel like amnestics solve your problem because if you amnesticize your character at the end of every month you might as well have killed him. All his character development is gone and none of his history matters. So move away from using D-Class as entities by which your plot is furthered. Make them people instead, give them wants and desires and understand the real-life implications of their history and most importantly, let their history develop over time. That's it. Don't forget to subscribe and share this video with your friends and if you like the new graphics, let me know in the comments down below. Thanks for listening.