talks about the counterinsurgency in delving efforts in the end. >> the u.s. achieved improvements in security that has an ultimately been worth on how it ends? here is where i hesitate. it is also possible five years down the road we will be back in a new civil war in him. isis is slowly emerging. it is much worse than the telly bond. the tallied on is entrenched and how they were defeated. if we end up in a new civil war in afghanistan, a new safe haven for the taliban and isis, those would be worth the price. >> sunday night at 8:00 on c-span's q&a. >> earlier this week, the atlantic held a forum on the gulf coast, 10 years after hurricane katrina. this panel focuses on the experiences of young african-american males in new orleans. it is 25 minutes. ♪ jarvis: good afternoon, everyone. i am jarvis deberry of nola.com and "the new orleans times-picayune." we have a discussion of the problems facing young black males in this post-katrina environment. on my far, far left -- i will introduce people as they speak. i will start with mark walters. you are with the micah project. i will get you to tell people what that is in a second, but i know you said you grew up in the lower ninth ward. mr. walters: yes, sir. jarvis: and i know you have talked about, very openly, your experiences in new orleans. i first question to you, growing up where you did, if you can think about the young, black boys in your neighborhood. how many of them "made it?" how many avoided the criminal justice system, did not get shot or killed, have gainful employment, and those things that we typically think of as measures of success today. mr. walters: as i was being briefed on this question i had a blank stare because i found it troubling i could not think of anybody that has been successful or, so-called, "made it out," and me being a community organizer, the most prominent thing of the people i used to hang with, it is a low mark. not taking away anything from the job, but they are not exposed to doctors, lawyers. i do not know any that i have grown up with that have made it to those respective levels. jarvis: but how many -- you have talked about being incarcerated yourself. is that a very common experience in your neighborhood? does that characterize most of the people in your neighborhood? mr. walters: most definitely. i basically followed what i saw. that was the common trend of if you are not on the street dealing, or if you were in -- if you did not go to jail, you are not considered to be real, or a gangster, and stuff like that. that is sad, but it is a true fact. i followed what i saw in my uncles, cousins, and people i was surrounded by. jarvis: chief harrison, when i talked to you earlier today and i told you about the question i was going to asked mr. walters, you said i have to think hard about that question myself. you have to think about the number of black boys you grew up with that "made it" in new orleans. why is that such a struggle to remember those folks? chief harrison: first of all, it is a great question, but i don't think we are that different. i was born and raised here in new orleans. my parents were educators. my mother was a teacher. my father was a middle school principal. although they were divorced by the time i was 5 -- my sister and i grew up with my mother -- they were strict disciplinarians, but i had some opportunities that a bunch of my friends didn't have, and when we moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, every neighborhood we moved to there were young boys there were just like me. they were in single-parent homes. i had a good relationship with my father, many of the young man -- the young men did not have what i had. they did not have the opportunities. they got in trouble. we got in trouble. i just had people close enough to me to pull me back and to help guide and mold me and catch me before i got too far -- followed the wrong crowd too far. i was fortunate. a lot of my friends did well also, and a lot of them did not. one by one, many began to become familiar with the criminal justice system. now, most of them did well by the time i got to high school. a lot did well. in my early days, i knew a lot of young men that were getting in trouble, but i had a good support system. i had something they did not have and while my family tried to take in and surround me with as many young men that were positive and take in as many to help as they could, i found myself following one crowd one day, and another crowd the next day. i do not think we are that much different. growing up in an urban city, you are going to have to make decisions on the friends you are going to make, you are going to follow, or you are going to lead. jarvis: we are all familiar with the report from the department of justice in 2011 -- a scathing report about the department before you took over, i will point out, but one of the things -- a judge said if you grew up a black teenager in new orleans, i guarantee you have had an incident with the police. i heard you make similar statements. is there a relationship between unconstitutional policing and victims not living up to the potential they ought to -- is it intertwined in some way? chief harrison: i think at some level it is. our policies create more harm than good some time. while on some level we think we are providing services that citizens want to protect and serve them, sometimes it is negatively affecting people unnecessarily. we have had to look at that. for example, last year we revised some of our arrest practices and how we arrest people on minor misdemeanor warrants from neighboring parishes. we no longer do that would that is -- no longer do that. that is unnecessary -- arresting people, introducing them to the criminal justice system on something very minor. issuing summonses for a simple possession of marijuana instead of making a physical arrest. so, while we are looking at how we deliver police service, we are also looking at our own practice to make sure we are not unnecessarily introducing people to the system or reintroducing people to the system unnecessarily. jarvis: we have also with us ms. margaret simms, who is an urban institute fellow. i know that you have studied unemployment, black unemployment in particular. 50 years ago lyndon johnson made a very revelatory statement about poverty when he said "negro poverty is not white poverty. many of its causes and many of its cures are the same, but there are differences," and i wonder if that is still true. are there differences between black poverty and white poverty in this country and if there are differences, have our policies and programs addressed those differences adequately? ms. simms: well, it is true that black poverty is different and one of the major ways in which you can see that it is different is if we look at the national statistics in a given year, you will find that black children might be two to three times as likely to be as poor as white children. what you do not see is how long they are in poverty over the course of their childhood. and if you look at that, you find that black children are more likely to live more than half of their childhood years in poverty and that is a much heavier burden for children in terms of their ability to succeed because if you are poor and you live in a poor neighborhood you have fewer resources to draw on to help you achieve all of the things we have been listening to this morning -- good early childhood experiences, a sound education, connections, as we heard earlier, two people who can tell you where to find a job, can vouch for you when you go for your first job while you are still in school, perhaps. it is different and it requires compensatory action if you want to level the playing field, which is something president johnson talked about in his address. jarvis: and, so, do we have -- i am guessing we do not have enough poverty programs or enough programs to affect poverty, but the programs, the philanthropy that we have, do they adequately address the racial aspect of it, or are there gaps in that regard? ms. simms: there are gaps. certainly before and since president obama has issued his community challenge under my brother's keeper, there is more focused attention on how we should go about it, but the resources are not going to be able to solve the problem overnight, even if they are dedicated because these are problems that not only have been persistent, they stand most of a pre-adult life and you have to come up with and implement and scale a lot of different policies to make sure children start out with a good foundation and throughout their childhood they have the support to succeed. jarvis: to your right is ms. ludger montgomery tab run, -- la june montgomery tabron, and you have talked about pace, and how are you addressing some of the problems the no really in -- new orleans are addressing? ms. tabron: at the kellogg foundation, we believe people have the capacity to change their own lives. we know that the change happens locally. the -- we must work within the local construct with organizations and institutions that are there on the ground and look at the issues in that community in a comprehensive way. so, in new orleans, one of our place-based programs, our priority programs -- we chose new orleans because we have been here and funding here since 1942, but after katrina we leveraged all of our school-based health clinics that were throughout the city and we used that as a way of going back into those communities and providing support from the most local level up. so, in the space around young males of color, as we were working here, we learned very early that there were issues of trauma and violence within the community that caused us to adapt our program, and as we were defining health, it did not include issues like trauma and violence, so we changed it to adapt to what the community determined was the way out. we found locally-based organizations like the youth empowerment project -- jarvis: somebody here from youth empowerment project, clearly. ms. tabron: liberty's kitchen -- these are organizations working with young males and people of color to bring those support structures and systems to their so they do feel like there is hope in their future. jarvis: your foundation has studied, what you told me, is the cost of not employing young, black men of color. can you talk about that? people are focused on what the program will cost, but how much will it cost us if we do not have the programs? ms. tabron: that is exactly right. i heard the mayor earlier today mentioned that it costs a lot and they are using limited resources, but we produced a publication called the business case for racial equity and it looks at the economic opportunity that exists within this country if we were to employ people of color at the same pace as white. in the nation, if we were to employ people of color, we would add $2 trillion to the national earning potential of the country, which goes to tax basis and tax revenue for a community, so where new orleans is currently -- community. so where new orleans is currently struggling to find resources, we have resources in new orleans and it is the young people, the people of color, 50% of these young men who are unemployed could come back into the workforce and bring a revenue and tax base back into the city. jarvis: we keep hearing the people of new orleans -- 52%, 52% -- 52% of the black males in new orleans are not working. that sounds like an outrageous number two me and those sitting here, but how does that compare to other cities of similar size across the country? ms. simms: you need to put it in some perspective, which is the thing that we sometimes fail to do, and that is how does it compare to their white counterparts? there you see the stark contrast. you can say no or let's has not recovered economically and they are unemployed because the jobs -- new orleans has not recovered economically and they are unemployed because the jobs of never come back, but the truth is these jobs were never there for the young men and they were not there for a variety of reasons. when you look at any cut of the data, you find the racial differential, so you cannot dismiss race as a factor. earlier, the mayor talked about the need for training in response to a question about inadequate transportation, and all of those things are important, and many of those come back to race. the reason they do not have training is because they were in communities where they did not have access to the training. they were not able to get into it. they live in communities that have poor transportation and they cannot afford an automobile. it is very hard to state it is individual deficits -- say it is individual deficits that are the cause of this, because it is not. jarvis: chief, i asked you to imagine if the unemployment situation is done away with tomorrow, what that looks like for the police department and policing in the city -- how much is that driving the crime rate, all of that that you are dealing with? chief harrison: it is one of the key things that drives it. in my 24 years, and most police officers would answer it the same way -- most people that we come in contact with that have offended in some capacity struggle with employment, are not employed, lack the educational capacity, or the job skills and actual jobs to have meaningful employment and income to sustain themselves and have some quality of life. they innovate to have the quality of life and the things they want. they innovate by other means. so, many of the people that offend on a serious level, when we talk about violent crime, are people that do not have job skills and jobs because of a lack of education, because of a lack of many things, but the majority of the people we come in contact with at that level are not employed. i think if we did not have an unemployment problem, we would not have a crime problem. we would still have some crime, but it would largely be other small things and not this large violent crime thing that we have in new orleans which is a culture of violence directly connected to work, skills, and education. jarvis: mr. walters, i will end with you before we take questions from the audience. i heard you say a few weeks ago now that a lot of the programs that are meant to help people such as yourself are like clothes off the rack and not clothes tailor-made to the body. mr. walters: exactly. jarvis: i want you to take some time to talk about what you think would help, and you are with the --micah project -- the micah project, so talk about what they are doing to help young boys like you? mr. walters: we do not deal with the programmatic piece, but we connect with organizations that are successful with it. one of the key things is to close the culture gap. when you concentrate a group of people to people that are like-minded, birds of a feather flock together, but if you -- just for example, with affordable housing, i have my reservations about that because it is a concentration of four people. if you have mixed income housing on a real level where you expose poor people to the wealthy people and you have them coexist, then the day of rub off on each other. the wealthy tend to learn what the poor actually go through and the poor actually learn that there is success out there outside of what they are used to and that is what you have to do with the youth. expose them to things outside of their community. bring them to the capital. i have only been to the capital twice, and that was once as a community organizer and another time was years ago when i was in high school. expose them to those different levels of things so that they know that they actually exist. i think that is where it starts, closing the culture gap. jarvis: you talked about getting one job because you forgot to say that you had been convicted of a crime. how difficult has it been with convictions on your record to find employment in this area? mr. walters: i will say being back home in new orleans for about two years, god has had his hand in my life because getting this job, i was tailor fitted for this job working with reentering criminal justice, so it felt like the exact placement where i was supposed to be. i have individuals that i work with or represent that still cannot get a job and they are still trying to figure it out. it burdens me because i do not know the answer and i am right there with them trying to figure it out. so, i think that just -- i do not know. it has to be a holistic approach. we have to tackle this from a holistic perspective. jarvis: we will go to the audience. if anybody has -- i see one right here. >> we will bring the microphones to you. amy: my name is amy and my question is, when you're talking about universal employment, is that at the minimum wage, which is not a livable wage, and you have a choice of having a job that is not a legal job, where you could make more money that is illegal, -- doing a job that is illegal, which is the case in the city. i am wondering what you think of those problems? jarvis: ms. tabron, you addressed opportunities. ms. tabron: there is a bio information field growing in new orleans. how do you prepare young people and those people of color for those jobs, which are not minimum wage jobs? there are other industries that are flourishing. there is a whole industry of coding for applications, technology, and what we learn through one of our grantees is you can take any one in five youths, young persons, and they have the aptitude to make code and the applications that are needed throughout this country and the world. they just need to be matched to those opportunities. i think what we are talking about is new industry, creative ways of engaging young people, and then they have the inherent skills to be capable of those. jarvis: ok. i think we have time for one more question. stephen: sorry to be hogging. it seems like i always have a question. my name is stephen kennedy. i remember lyndon b. johnson did the war on poverty with training. training is one thing, but then having jobs. my question, with the kellogg foundation, would you be interested -- when we talk about jobs, most of the people coming home from prison have challenges finding employment. would the kellogg foundation be interested in teaching formerly incarcerated individuals how to be entrepreneurs and building those social skills? do you think that would be a good approach in new orleans to reduce unemployment in the african-american community? ms. tabron: absolutely, and we are doing that in new orleans and throughout the country. many of you may have heard the 100,000 jobs for community youth. the kellogg foundation has joined with businesses across the country to create over 100,000 jobs, and what we are doing in that work is to build support structures, work on issues of ban the box, etc., allowing those that have been incarcerated go back into employment opportunities. yes, we do that all of the time. jarvis: i wish our conversation could be longer. this is the end of this. you can find all of these people. i think there twitter feeds are listed by their name. thank you all so much for your participation and your attention. thank you all so much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] on saturdays program, archival footage of the hurricane and its aftermath, plus, your phone calls. washington journal's life each morning is evident luck on c-span. >> this weekend, politics, books, and american history. on saturday, hurricane katrina's 10th anniversary with live coverage from new orleans of the public. speakers include bill clinton and mitch landrieu. sunday evening, speeches from democratic candidates hillary clinton and bernie sanders of the democratic national committee summer meeting in minneapolis. on c-span2, on book tv, author dan-el padilla peralta talks about his book, "undocumented." sunday, to mark the 10th anniversary of hurricane katrina, several programs that storm and its aftermath you cheering former mississippi governor and investigated for porter romney green. on invested -- former nasa astronaut donald thomas discusses the history of space stations, comparing russian and american programs. in looking at the future of international space station efforts. at 4:00, appointment is in tokyo. from the japanese invasion of the philippines and the death march through the surrender ceremony in 1945. get our complete schedule and c-span.org. announcer: tonight, events related to the 10th anniversary of hurricane katrina. next, craig few gate on lessons for disaster preparedness learned from katrina. then, the experiences of the baquet family in new orleans. 10 years ago, hurricane katrina struck new orleans and the gulf coast, causing over 1200 deaths and $100 billion in property damage. atlantic magazine hosted a atlantic magazine hosted a conference on long-term