PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In Rhode Island on Friday, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said she hasn't yet decided if she will try to get arrested — as she did in 2012 — outside the main gates of Hofstra University, where Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, are scheduled to debate on Monday night.

During a speech at Rhode Island College, Stein urged those in the audience to come to New York to stand alongside her, outside Hofstra, in protest against her exclusion from the first televised presidential debate.

"It's going to be kind of a garrison state there, sort of a militarized situation,'' she predicted, "so I don't think there will be any storming of the gates."

"There may be an option for civil disobedience but we don't yet know about that,'' she told a Journal reporter. "At this point we are not asking people to come for the purpose of civil disobedience. We are asking people to come and stand up for our democracy."

The candidates needed to meet a 15-percent threshold across several major national polls in order to qualify for the debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates determined that the polling averages for the candidates had Clinton at 43 percent, Trump at 40.4 percent, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson at 8.4 percent and Stein at 3.2 percent.

Asked whether she will seek to be arrested — as she did in 2012, when she was excluded from a debate between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney — Stein told a reporter: "You know we haven't yet decided our strategy, so we'll see how that plays out."

Earlier, in her speech to a crowd of about 70 in RIC's Sapinsley Hall, Stein hit the major themes of her third-party campaign, including a desire to make college tuition-free while lifting student debt from the backs of "43 million" Americans.

If the treasury can "bail out'' the Wall Street banks that plunged the nation into an economic crisis, it should bail out "the victims'' of the country's wrong-headed economic policies, she said. She mentioned, to applause, a Wall Street "transaction tax" among the potential means for raising the necessary revenue to eliminate tuition, along with cuts in the "dangerous and bloated" military budget.

She called for the creation of citizen review boards — and independent investigators — to probe alleged police misconduct and a "peace offensive in the Middle East."

Seeking to win over Vermont Democrat Bernie Sanders' backers, she said: "In this election, Americans are looking for a new place to go. ... The Bernie movement has been looking for a place to go. ... We are a place where the progressive movement puts down their feet and builds for the long haul ... that puts people, planet and peace over profits."

She said she would not sleep well at night if either Clinton or Trump were elected president, calling them both "lethal choices."

During a question-and-answer segment, David Fox of Providence voiced his concern about third parties: "I feel that we lost Al Gore because of a third party in 2000. He certainly would have been a great president. ... I am deadly afraid of Trump. I think Trump would destroy the green movement in this country, which Hillary would not."

"It bothers me that a third party could throw this election to a Donald Trump,'' Fox said.

Stein's response: "We can only imagine what Donald Trump wants to do, but Hillary has been very clear. She wants to start a war with Russia over Syria by declaring a no-fly zone, which basically means we are going to be shooting down Russian aircraft. OK. That's a nuclear arms power. We have 2,000 weapons on hair-trigger alert. If anyone can ... slide us into a nuclear war with Russia, Hillary Clinton certainly has the balls to do it."

"I will not sleep well if Donald Trump is elected. I will not sleep well if Hillary Clinton is elected,'' Stein said. "It is important not to drink the Kool-Aid of powerlessness."