Assuming you are talking about JavaScript in an HTML document.
You can't do this directly since, as far as the JSP is concerned, it is outputting text, and as far as the page is concerned, it is just getting an HTML document.
You have to generate JavaScript code to instantiate the variable, taking care to escape any characters with special meaning in JS. If you just dump the data (as proposed by some other answers) you will find it falling over when the data contains new lines, quote characters and so on.
The simplest way to do this is to use a JSON library (there are a bunch listed at the bottom of http://json.org/ ) and then have the JSP output:
<script type="text/javascript">
var myObject = <%= the string output by the JSON library %>;
</script>
This will give you an object that you can access like:
myObject.someProperty
in the JS.