Paul Bickford
Northern News Services

Hay River (Dec 12/05) - Cindy Caudron is following in her mother's career footsteps.

In the 1970s, her mother, Doris Caudron, was a social worker and did probation services work in the NWT.

Cindy Caudron is a probation officer in Hay River and a former member of the National Parole Board.

In 1994, the younger Caudron also started the same job, and is now one of four probation officers in Hay River.

"It was kind of funny," Caudron says of her first posting as a social worker in Fort Providence where her mother once worked. "I ended up sitting in the same office she used to sit in."

Caudron worked as a social worker until 1997.

When doing probation work for Corrections Services Canada as part of that job, she knew her interest lay more in that area than with social work.

During her time in Fort Providence, Caudron says her work in getting community members involved with integrating parolees back into society came to the attention of the National Parole Board (NPB), which felt she would make a good board member.

"I pulled the community in, because those are the people who really know those individuals," she says.

In 1997, she submitted a resume to the NPB. "I was the youngest person ever appointed to the National Parole Board in the Prairie region, and they believed the youngest in Canada," she recalls, noting she was 37 at the time.

She served on panels that met federal prisoners in the Prairie region, which includes the NWT, and determined if they were ready for conditional releases.

Caudron notes that when she accepted the NPB appointment she promised her son she would stay at home when he turned 13. So she resigned from the board in 2000 just a couple of months shy of the end of her three-year appointment.

The NPB accepted her resignation on the condition that her name would be sent to Ottawa for a possible future appointment to the board.

In 2000, Caudron began working with probation services, which had just become a separate entity within the Department of Justice.

Her mother, who is now nearing 65, is still supervising parolees in central Alberta.

Caudron, 44, says her mother set the bar high for her daughter to follow.