Have you met Andrea James? She’s running to be your governor.

When Andrea James arrived at the gubernatorial debate at WBZ-TV last Thursday, she was — understandably — not in a great mood. She’s a candidate for governor, but she wasn’t invited to participate in the debate. 

“We’re tired of mainstream media that wants to pretend there’s not a third candidate running,” James told me as we stood at the edge of Soldiers Field Road, a stone’s throw away from where supporters of Democratic Gov. Maura Healey and Republican challenger Mike Minogue were yelling and blasting air horns. “None of these networks, including yours, has talked about me as a third candidate. I’m on the ballot, and I’m running, and I deserve the right to be heard.”

James, an independent, then turned her focus to Healey. She suggested that the governor was personally responsible for James’ exclusion from the two general election debates taking place this fall.

“We have gone down this absolutely slippery slope in the commonwealth of Massachusetts where we have leadership that is too cowardly to debate everybody who is a candidate for the governor’s seat,” James said. “If I was the governor and somebody was left out, I wouldn’t go forward with the debate. Shame on Maura Healey.”

(The Healey campaign referred requests for comment to WBZ-TV and WCVB-TV. WBZ-TV did not respond to a request for comment; WCVB-TV, which is hosting the second debate with the Boston Globe and WBUR, said James was excluded because “[s]he didn’t meet the consortium’s objective criteria” and did not respond to a follow-up question about what those criteria were.)

A few minutes later, James and her supporters joined the scrum. Then James stepped away and walked briskly into the WBZ-TV building, where she introduced herself as one of the candidates running for governor and said she was there to debate.

Her initial exchange with the WBZ-TV gatekeeper was cordial. But word came back from inside the station that James was trespassing, and would be removed by members of the Massachusetts State Police if she didn’t exit. Then the mood turned.

Again, James decried what she called Healey’s unwillingness to debate her and corporate media’s determination to exclude her. When the employee moved to steer James out the door, she exclaimed, “Don’t usher me out like that!”

“You’ve been asked to leave,” the employee said.

“I’m going to leave, but you’re at least going to hear what I have to say before putting me out,” James replied.

“No, you’ve been asked to leave,” the employee repeated.

And so she did.

As the third candidate in the race, James, a former Democrat, is running largely to the left of Healey. She’s motivated by what she considers injustices in prisons and is an advocate for universal housing, health care and child care. She also believes that the newly passed PROTECT Act, which is supposed to limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to achieving that goal.

For the Massachusetts media, James’ candidacy presents a conundrum. Realistically, the chances of her winning are theoretical at best. Then again, she did qualify for the ballot. She would be the first Black woman to govern Massachusetts if elected. And if she were granted a place on the debate stage with her rivals, or given a fraction of the media attention they’ve received over the past year, her chances might look very different.

Why she’s running

The next day, as she unlocked her campaign headquarters in Nubian Square, James greeted a man who looked to be homeless who was resting near the entrance.

“This is why I’m running,” she said. “You see the struggle of people, and it’s gotten worse.”

“I grew up here ... when the elevated trains actually existed, when the Orange Line ran straight through here,” James added. “People were poor and working-class folk, but it seemed like there was more cohesion to the community. It felt more like a community. And that was leading up to what was known as the war on drugs, which we call chemical warfare against Black communities.”

In addition to the decline she sees in Nubian Square and other poorer communities around the state, such as Holyoke and New Bedford, she’s also convinced that the state’s cost-of-living crisis can only be effectively addressed by someone who’s grappled with it firsthand.

“I know about this personally,” she said. “I know what it’s like to not be able to pay my rent, to not afford child care.”

The engine that drives her candidacy, a passion for criminal justice reform, is personal to her, too.

In 2009, James was sentenced to two years in prison for the felony offenses of mail and wire fraud. She had been working as a defense attorney in Roxbury and enjoying what she describes as an almost idyllic existence running an office that doubled as a neighborhood hub, with local grandmothers stopping by with gifts of food and youth coming around to turn in their guns.

But then James misappropriated client funds and — she stresses — subsequently self-reported her crimes.

“I have a moral compass,” James said. “I wanted to make things right. Did I think that they were going to send me to federal prison and take my law license from me for the rest of my life? No, but it wouldn’t have changed my decision. ... I f—ed up. You know, I used money that was in my control that I should not have taken.”

What needs to change?

She told GBH News criminal justice issues are what ultimately motivated her to enter the race.

Starting while she was incarcerated, James threw herself into the cause of prison reform.

She founded the prison-abolition groups Families for Justice as Healing and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, focused in particular on eliminating prisons for women. She’s won national recognition for her work.

She helped change state law to end the shackling of female prisoners during labor and childbirth, and to allow judges to consider primary caretaker status — for example, a parent with a younger child or an adult with an older parent — when handing down sentences for certain crimes.

So far, though, James and her allies have been unable to convince the Healey administration to shutter MCI-Framingham, the oldest women’s prison in the United States. Instead, the Healey administration plans to downsize and renovate the facility, a move James calls shortsighted.

The better option, she contends, is to grant clemency to as many women incarcerated there as possible, thereby paving the way for the closure of the prison in the near future and the use of hundreds of millions of dollars for other purposes. It’s a step James said she would take in her first week as governor.

“We’ve got one of the highest populations of elderly people incarcerated [at MCI- Framingham], she said. “They’re not going to cause any more harm; they’ve been in prison for decades. Let ’em go. We have women in Framingham right now ... who have dementia. We have people who are terminally ill. Bring them out.”

James is also driven by deep frustration with the leadership on Beacon Hill. A major injustice, in her eyes, is the state’s ongoing refusal to return the right to vote to incarcerated people convicted of felonies, a right that was removed by ballot question in 2000. James has testified on Beacon Hill in favor of restoring that right, and at one point in our conversation she identified the Legislature’s most recent failure to do so as the moment she decided to run.

At another point in our conversation, James mused that women’s incarceration is the thread that unifies the planks of her platform, including housing for all, universal health care, universal child care and equitable funding for education. She also cast her experience with the carceral system as a unique qualification.

“I have a very specific purpose,” James said. “I think the time is right for a person who has direct experience — who actually knows what it is not only to have struggled but to stand in the heat and be [accountable].”

Yet it was also clear, as James discussed her run, that she sees her experience of prosecution and incarceration as a topic that’s been the subject of inappropriate focus by the media and the public.

“Who gets to be held accountable?” she added. “Maura Healey — people want to criminalize me in perpetuity because of a mistake that I made. ... But who gets to hold her accountable?”

What comes next for James

Right now, the standard metrics used to assess a campaign’s viability suggest that James is — to put it kindly — a long shot to win.

No polls have shown her with more than single-digit support. And most polls haven’t included her at all.

James also appears to be struggling when it comes to fundraising, pulling in about $55,000 and spending just over $50,000 over the last two years.

But there is inevitably a circular quality to arguments that justify the exclusion of candidates like James from debates. After all, if they aren’t given the same platform as the other candidates to get their message out, how can they gain enough ground with voters and donors to be taken seriously?

“I know from watching the debate that just took place, I would’ve brought into the discussion some things that need to be talked about, some issues that needed to be raised that neither of them talked about,” James said.

The first gubernatorial debate consisted mainly of Healey blaming Trump for Massachusetts’ problems and Minogue blaming Healey for blaming Trump. In contrast, James wants to also talk about reparations, which she supports as a way to close Massachusetts’ racial wealth gap, and the use of micro-housing to address the state’s addiction and affordability crises.

But Healey has raised more than $11 million while in office. On top of his own fundraising, Minogue has injected $17 million of his own money into the race.

Maybe, James says in her office in Nubian Square, it’s simply not possible to run a campaign without millions of dollars behind you.

But she hopes that’s not the case.

“It’s one of the things we’re trying to do with this campaign,” James said. “It’s a grassroots, people-led campaign. And as long as we don’t have candidates who are of that — who are actually representing the people that they are on the ground with every day working with, and they come from those communities — we’re going to have a bunch of millionaires who don’t understand the struggle of everyday people.”