The state's answer to the prison movement was architectural: the control unit. Marion's H-Unit, built after the movement years, became in 1983 — following the killing of two guards — a permanent lockdown, the first prison in America run entirely on solitary confinement; its "Marion model" was exported to the states' supermaxes and perfected at ADX Florence, where the political prisoners of this database from Oscar López to the Green Scare's CMU inmates were concentrated. The Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, prisoners' writings, and UN condemnations built the case that the control unit is torture.

Its most notorious experiment was the Lexington High Security Unit, an underground isolation prison for women political prisoners — Susan Rosenberg, Silvia Baraldini, Alejandrina Torres — whose sensory-deprivation regime was closed by federal court order in 1988 after Amnesty International's intervention: the movement's one clean victory over the architecture of disappearance.