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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired raw, smuggled-out footage of a recent prison riot in Lansing, Kansas, where inmates took control of a cell block to protest a lack of healthcare and three out of four prisoners have now tested positive for the coronavirus.

At the start of her Thursday night show, Maddow explained that she had obtained footage of the riot taken from inside the prison by one of the prisoners, but that after confirmation, felt confident in airing it.

What followed was a shaky, hand-held cell phone video showing disguised prisoners roaming freely around a cell block with no guards present. The narrator walks around showing trash and glass strewn everywhere, barricaded doors, and broken windows and then adds: “They ain’t giving us no healthcare for this coronavirus…They ain’t giving us no help for these motherfuckers. So we have to turn up real quick.”

“It’s a little hurly burly,” Maddow noted. “A video shot by a prisoner, inside Lansing state prison in Kansas. And obviously, what’s going on there is the kind of thing that you would call an uprising, or a riot, or an incident of unrest, depending on your perspective or maybe depending on your politics, but the prisoners there did really tear the place up.”

“As of that morning, the day they started tearing the place up, more than 14 members of the prison staff at Lansing had tested

positive and had been sent home from work, 12 prisoners who had tested positive had been moved into a medical isolation unit,” she explained. “Now we have started to get the full, first full picture of what has really happened there, and the riot turns out to be just a crack in the window into this story. On Monday of this week, Lansing correctional facility reported that the first prisoner has died from coronavirus at that facility. Yesterday, Wednesday, the prison reported that a second prisoner had died from coronavirus at that facility.”

Prisoners had been housed up to four in a cell prior to the riot and guards were only wearing cotton masks. As of Wednesday, Maddow went on to add, 75 members of the prison staff have reportedly tested positive at Lansing. In addition, early test results found 75 percent of Lansing inmates now have the virus as well.

“So, when those prisoners in Kansas were rioting,” Maddow noted, “they were in fact, living in a unit where almost all of them would get infected with this disease, within just a couple of weeks. And now two of them thus far are dead.”

“We are far enough into this thing now, that we know where it is likely to be in large numbers. And we know for sure where it spreads the fastest, if we don’t take steps to stop it. We know that now,” an exasperated Maddow

notes. “That said, it’s still hard to get tests in this country, even this far into it, even with nearly 63,000 Americans dead from this already, it is still hard to get testing here, but we do know now from watching the contours of this epidemic, from watching the number, watching those red dots on the epidemiological maps sprout all over the country and then zooming in and figuring out where those are, we know now where we ought to be testing, if we only had tests.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

Tags: Coronavirus, Covid-19, prison riot, prisoners, Rachel Maddow