Convicted Degenerate Phone Prankster, 20, Arrives At The Big House In Texas

After a brief stay in a county jail, convicted felon James Tyler Markle arrived last week at Texas’s notorious Huntsville prison to begin serving time for a telephone prank.

The freshly shorn Markle, 20, is being held at Huntsville’s Holliday Unit, an intake facility where state inmates are assessed by corrections officials. Markle, seen in the new mug shot at right, could spend up to two years at Holliday before being transferred to his unit of assignment, according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman.

A blubbering Markle--who used the online handle “Prankster” when tormenting victims on the phone--was sentenced in late-November to five years in jail for criminal mischief in connection with a hoax call he placed to a McDonald’s restaurant. Markle was once a leading figure with Pranknet, the notorious confederation of online vandals.

While Markle’s projected release date is in March 2013, he could be paroled as early as this June from Huntsville, Texas’s oldest prison and home to the state’s death chamber.