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Agency, Character, and Identity Project

The chief new initiative of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at John Jay College is a multi-disciplinary project examining the ways in which agency, character, and identity are conceptualized and the ways in which different conceptualizations have implications for key issues of criminal justice ethics. The ways in which offenders conceptualize themselves, their actions, and their accountability is important to the capacity for ethical self-correction, for the ability to successfully re-enter the broader society, and to whether agents are likely to commit additional offenses in the future. There is a complex intersection of empirical, conceptual, and normative issues regarding agency and modes of self-conception. That intersection has implications for how agents understand their own capacities and characters. That, in turn, has implications for how they are regarded by others and for what it seems reasonable to expect of them.