Anyone convicted in Washington State of a sex offense committed after August 2001 will be sent to prison with both a minimum and a maximum term. The minimum term will be the sentence the judge would have given under determinate sentencing. The maximum term will be the statutory maximum for the offense-life in prison in the case of Class A felonies. The Indeterminate Sentence Review Board will decide just when the offender leaves prison.

Criminal defense lawyers have denounced the law as risking "more Wenatchees--" a reference to the epidemic of apparent convictions of the innocent that swept through Wenatchee, Washington in the mid-1990's. Many of the Wenatchee defendants chose plea bargains rather than trial partly because they could have been sentenced to decades in prison if convicted at trial.