Psycho-Legal Assessment & Intellectual Disability (PLAID) Lab

The Psycho-Legal Assessment & Intellectual Disability (PLAID) Lab is directed by Dr. Mary Elizabeth (M.E.) Wood. The PLAID Lab is focused on using data to understand how decisions are made and to improve outcomes in the criminal legal system. The lab and associated projects represent both a narrow focus on a particular subset of defendants (i.e., individuals with Intellectual Disability, ID), as well as broader work that examines assessment in the forensic context (i.e., psychometric properties of instruments, the association between assessment results and ultimate outcomes, the creation and development of structured tools to guide the forensic assessment process, program/process evaluations of systems and specialty courts). 

Intellectual Disability (ID) and the Criminal Legal System
In recent years, individuals with intellectual/cognitive impairments have been inappropriately diverted to the criminal justice system – and therefore state psychiatric hospitals – two systems that are largely unable to provide the individualized care of, and treatment for, the unique impairments with which individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/DD) present. This shift has naturally followed from the diversion of resources from community mental health centers and tailored treatment facilities for individuals with ID/DD, beginning with the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s, and continuing with large-scale refusals to fund effective mental health treatment for individuals in need. Related to this paradigm shift in the forensic context, Dr. Wood has a particular interest in the provision of effective and adequate evaluation of individuals who present with concomitant cognitive impairments and psycho-legal deficits following determinations by the court of incompetence to stand trial (IST).  Currently, there is little published data on this population, and little is known about the method, process, and/or effectiveness of restoration treatment, and/or the outcomes following adjudication by the Court. Thus, this is a large focus of the PLAID Lab's current work and projects.

Assessment in the Forensic Context
Within this broad domain, the PLAID Lab is focused on investigating the psychometric properties, and associated ecological validity, of assessment instruments that are utilized in the forensic context. This work has included examinations of two commonly used competence assessment instruments (CAIs), the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool – Criminal Adjudication (MacCAT-CA; Wood, Anderson, & Glassmire, 2017) and the Competence Assessment for Standing Trial for Defendants with Mental Retardation (CAST-MR; Wood, Brown, Bitting, Slobogin, & Bowerman, 2022). Additional projects have examined the specificity and false positive rates of specific scales in forensic assessments (i.e., the PAI overreporting scales, Wood, Coffey, & Glassmire, 2021; WAIS-IV embedded validity indicators, Glassmire, Wood, Ta, Kinney, & Nitch, 2019). Projects  also include empirical investigations of the forensic systems and procedures in place – from both a granular and more global lens (see Publications tab for examples of recent projects that have focused on forensic systems for defendants with ID and/or misdemeanants, for example).