Can you help catch Mr X?

“Excuse me officer, I’d like to report a crime. I’m an on-therun crook and my details have been given to the local paper!”

You can imagine the conversation now. Well, actually, I don’t imagine you can. However, one reader certainly could when he took to Kentonline to voice his very real concern that at-large prisoners would sue the Ministry of Justice for breaching their privacy.

“If you don’t think they’d make a complaint to the MOJ, you’re being pretty naive,” he wrote, “They blatantly would. And win. And DPA breaches are very expensive.”

It came in response to an article about the department refusing to name 14 convicts who are unaccounted for having slipped out of Kent’s open prisons in the last decade.

You may think his opinion is in itself a tad naive, that of course those evading capture for crimes including manslaughter and people smuggling would avoid contacting the police at all costs and would be mad to seek legal proceedings against the very department responsible for tracking them down.

You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that, but it’s hard to think what else was driving the Moj’s thinking on this one.

“Data protection” was the barked response to any mention of personal details being provided, “what if they are targeted by vigilantes or have already been recaptured?”

Well a) I’d hope the authorities would have checked they weren’t relaxing at home and b) I’d hope the MOJ would know if they had been found.

Decisions like this are the reason why it’s increasingly difficult to work out exactly who the authorities are protecting, because anonymising dangerous escapees doesn’t make me feel any safer.