After serving prison time, Andrea James became a leading criminal justice advocate. Now she’s running for governor.

policy

“It’s time we start using the tremendous wealth in this state to invest in people’s needs.”

As Gov. Maura Haley runs for re-election, three Republican candidates are competing in a primary battle with hopes of facing her in the general election in November. But another candidate, an independent, hopes to disrupt the race. Andrea Jamesa community organization and criminal justice advocate that has focused on supporting incarcerated women, is making a long-shot bid for governor.

She’s not a traditional candidate: James was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison on federal fraud charges. He was a former real estate attorney It has been deleted In 2010 after he was accused of embezzling customer funds and defrauding mortgage lenders and homeowners.

In the decade since serving her prison sentence, James has publicly embraced her history and used it to guide her advocacy work. She is now seeking political office for the first time, running on a populist and progressive platform centered on the message of “putting people before profit.”

Boston.com recently caught up with James to learn more about her history and vision for Massachusetts.

The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for publication.

Boston.com: Tell me a little about yourself, your history in prison, and how it led you to the path you are on today.

Andrea James: The path I am on today did not begin with a fatal mistake I made long ago in my law practice. I grew up in Roxbury. My family has been here for seven generations. We’ve lived in the same house for five. I come from a family of activists and educators, and my grandmother broke the color barrier for black nurses here at Boston City Hospital. This campaign didn’t happen because I was incarcerated.

I made a huge mistake several years ago as an attorney. Primarily, my practice was criminal defense work, and I started out doing bank closings, and at that time, we didn’t even know the term predatory lending. I want to be very clear about this: My sin, the mistake I made was embezzling money that was owned by the banks, which were all predatory lenders. The reason I went to law school at Northeastern University was to practice on behalf of people who were struggling in the criminal law system. My work on this began years and decades ago. When I was a kid, that’s all I wanted to be, a criminal defense attorney. For the most part, I didn’t have paying clients. I was a barrister. I did the work, and I was very proud of it.

A small part of my work was transferring real estate and closing loans for banks, and the banks were my clients in the violation that occurred and led to my imprisonment. I did not engage in predatory lending. In fact, we at my law firm have done everything we can to help with the emergence of the most egregious predatory loan products; We did everything we could to help educate and inform families like mine, who have lived in their homes for generations, not to take out these loans because they were a rip-off.

I was sentenced in 2009, and the offense occurred years before that. Let me say one thing very clearly: I accept and accept full responsibility. I have self-reported my transgressions. I voluntarily gave up my license to practice law, which was one of the most heart-wrenching things I have ever done, and I believe in complete transparency and accountability. I knew I had made a terrible mistake when I tried to use bank-owned money to cover up a mistake I had made in my law practice. It was terrible. I stood for transparency and accountability, not just because now I’m running and we expect it from our government, but because I knew what it meant to stand up in the heat, take responsibility, and be held accountable.

Tell me about your advocacy work since leaving prison.

As a well-educated person who comes from a family that understands history from slavery to mass incarceration, I knew exactly what I was seeing inside a prison crowded with black, brown, and poor women who did not need to be imprisoned. They needed help.

I’ve been very lucky. I’m not the poster woman for incarcerated women. I had a family, I had a husband, I had my parents, and my children were safe. They stayed home. They stayed in their schools. Keep teaching. They were fed every evening. I remember being in the women’s prison at three in the morning and hearing a woman crying because she couldn’t bear another moment of separation from her children. This leads to generational incarceration, which is what we see here in Massachusetts. It leads to generational poverty, and does nothing.

Many of the people who work in politics now have never had the chemistry of life experiences that you’ve had, and so the policies they create are policies that do not represent public safety. They have nothing to do with public safety, and rely on police and prisons because this public safety infrastructure is completely ridiculous. Hurt people hurt people. Healthy people have the opportunity to grow.

I’ve spent 15 years building organizations. I built one here in Roxbury that works to stop a proposed $360 million women’s prison in Massachusetts, which is absolutely fiscally irresponsible. We have one of the lowest rates of women in prison in the country. We can be a shining example to the rest of the country. We’ve done over 10 years of research on that, on what’s possible other than just throwing people in prison and not offering them real things that will help them change their lives. She also created a multi-million dollar national organization for which she raised every cent. I have been able to manage and grow this budget over the years. We have worked with the Obama administration, the Biden administration, and each of the Departments of Justice and Education. We worked with the Sentencing Commission. We have helped coach over 100 women out of harsh drug war provisions where they were over-criminalized and over-sentenced. I founded the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, a global network of women working collectively.

How did you make the decision to run for governor?

I am not a politician. I don’t intend to be a career politician. I have never run for any office. But at some point, you just have to take a stand. For too long, both parties have catered to wealthy donors and not the people of Massachusetts.

The dividing line for me, actually, was attending these hearings at the Statehouse, and the last one at which I testified was about restoring the right to vote to incarcerated people. Massachusetts wants to continue portraying itself as a state that doesn’t suffer from voter disenfranchisement, but we do. People from all over the state testified that we do not need to disenfranchise any voter, and the commission never discussed this matter. After people come and express their hearts, they are never asked to come back to the table and discuss it or even say why this should not be voted out of committee. People are fighting for all these things: housing, health care, education and work. These bills are being introduced, and we have one of the least productive legislatures in the country. This was the case for me.

I’m running because Massachusetts’ economy is leaving too many people out. No matter what the Haley administration tells us about how great the economy is, the truth is that for most people, it is not great. It’s time we start using the tremendous wealth in this state to invest in people’s needs.

Why are you running as an independent?

I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. I was a delegate to the conference in September. Whoever was controlling the platform committee at the time had just decided that at the eleventh hour, in the dark of the night, they were going to purge the Democratic platform of all the things that advocates had been working for: government transparency, single-payer health care, environmental issues, worker protections, and, of course, the work we had done on the proposed moratorium on new prison construction. The leadership has not promoted any of these issues, but they are part of the Democratic Party platform. We had to collect signatures within a very short period of time, and we had to get down to the ground and fight to get those things back onto the platform.

The Democratic Party has lost its way. The focus is no longer on people’s needs. It has shifted more to presenting itself as very similar to the Republican Party. They are committed to wealthy donors and not to the needs of the people. In good conscience, I decided it was time to deregister, and decided to run as an independent. Both parties appear to have turned into fundraising organizations, and both parties work for wealthy donors. They don’t work for people.

We are a blue state, yet we still cannot move beyond issues that have been in our Democratic platform for years. I want to run around the issues and stay focused on the issues.

How do you view the race landscape now and assess the challenges you face as an independent candidate?

Unfortunately, the mainstream media supports this. We fight for democracy, and we fight to make voices heard that are constantly excluded. This race is further proof of that. We have grassroots dollars, and we’re just starting to increase our donations. But we’re competing against people who are millionaires. We are competing against people who have put their own money into the race so their voice can be heard. We’re running against three people, Republicans, who supported Trump and continue to support Donald Trump and his policies. And we have Maura Healey, who has proven that many of the things people ask for, she doesn’t stand for.

We run to win. We are definitely giving everything we can in this race, and I am determined to win. I am under no illusion. We do not have wealthy donors supporting this campaign. We have working people, we have unemployed people, we have single mothers giving us $10 donations. It’s a real grassroots campaign.

We’re trying to create this platform for people to have their voices heard and to have a race that doesn’t fully explain the reality of what’s going on. Our economy is now leaving a lot of people out. No matter what Maura Healey tells us, the truth is, it’s not great for most people.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

We need housing. We need rent stability. We need to build high-quality public housing, mixed-income, and affordable housing. We need to know how to reduce and control energy costs. We need health care. We need to create a state system that covers all health care for everyone without any copayments or deductibles. We need fully funded schools in every city in the city, we need to raise the minimum wage to $25, and fund free childcare so people can work. These are the things that will provide relief to families in one of the richest states in the country, allowing them to thrive instead of just struggling every day to survive. We need a governor who focuses on the needs of the people and not just the privileged few in the commonwealth.