ABS is an option, not all SE's came with it. If you have ABS, you will have a dash light for ABS. You can also see sensors and tone rings (toothed rings) on each wheel hub.
Brake lock up is not a desirable thing. You might not have a problem. Except for not locking up, how are the brakes behaving?
Brakes are never as effective when the pads/shoes are new before they have bedded into the rotors/drums. You may just need to drive it some more to allow everything to seat/bed in. I really want to stress this. Many people expect new brakes to be perfect right out of the box and they seldom are. You may be just expecting too much too soon.
Also the nature of the brake pad/shoe friction material can make a huge difference in brake effectivness. There are many aspects to braking charicteristics that are effected by material selection. For example some racing and high performance compounds are nearly useless until they are heated up. Some of the cheaper ones are soft and may stop well when clder but wear fast and fad badly when hot. And there are many stages in between.
A failed brake booster would make the brake pedal very hard to push. The booster assists you in pushing down the pedal. Try pushing on the pedal with the engine off and you will see what I mean. The booster does not do anything to make the brakes more effective, it only makes it easier to push the pedal.
When a master cylinder fails, the pedal will drop to the floor when you try to brake. At the biginning of failure, it won't hold the car if you are stopped on an incline without the pedal sinking to the floor with even foot pressure. That is, you stop on a slope and apply enough foot pressure to stop the car and no more. If you need to add more pressure to hold the car at rest and the pedal sinks, you may have a bad master. What happens is that the cups on the piston in the master will not hold fluid pressure so that the fluid by-passes and doesn't hold pressure.
