The underground came apart in a cascade of captures. On November 29, 1984, Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were arrested unloading 740 pounds of dynamite at a Cherry Hill, New Jersey storage locker; tried for possession alone, they received 58 years each — at the time among the longest such sentences in U.S. history, explicitly framed by supporters as punishment for their politics. In May 1985 Marilyn Buck, Linda Evans, and Laura Whitehorn were taken in Baltimore and elsewhere; Evans drew 40 years for false-ID gun purchases and harboring.
Rosenberg and Baraldini were sent to the underground Lexington High Security Unit, a small isolation prison for women political prisoners whose sensory-deprivation regime drew Amnesty International's condemnation and was closed by federal court order in 1988 — the case that put the term "political prisoner" back into American federal jurisprudence.