Word: minimum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...addition, the program promises to raise the minimum wage by nearly 30%, increase a variety of social benefits, hike corporate taxes and start a plan that would give more say in the management of factories to workers. The program has frightened away investors, both French and foreign. Euroeconomics, a Paris-based research firm owned by a group of banks, predicts that enactment of the left's platform would erode company profits, accelerate inflation to 20% a year and cause a balance of payments crisis...
Some of Herbert's scenes are masterful, and only further frustrate the reader by showing how well Herbert can write. A conversation between McKie and a Gowachin takes on the intensity and precision of military strategy. With a minimum of narration and a taut dialogue, the scene provides one of the book's few gripping passages...
...grounded in behavior modification theory, where a tantalizing reward is supposed to induce the desired behavior. But even if the philosophy is sound, it has filtered down through so many layers of bureaucracy that it loses any validity it might have had in the beginning. The thought of the minimum security jail at Walpole, with its few educational programs, and a few more visiting privileges, is supposed to tempt the men in the maximum end. But these men, as they will tell you themselves, have spent their lives fighting the authorities; it will take more than a few carrots, they...
Walpole offers nothing more than those few carrots to help rehabilitate a prisoner. Because the inmates are supposed to strive towards the minimum security programs, the prison offers no programs in the maximum end, where the toughest cases start out. There are, for example, no drug programs; self-confessed addicts in the max end have to go through withdrawal without support, so it isn't surprising that there's heavy drug traffic in Walpole. No skills are taught, except in a program designed, staffed and funded by the American Friends Service Committee in collaboration with the inmates themselves. Inmates...
...minimum end, things are slightly--but only slightly--better. The step system extends beyond this prison; the administration has to hold out other, better prisons--Norfolk, for example--as still more tempting carrots for rehabilitation. But the essential contradiction pervades the system: "progressive" behavior conflicts directly with behavior the inmates consider acceptable. From that perspective, the carrots look less and less enticing...