Every commissary operation balances these issues in its own way. Sandra Amoia, the superintendent of Groveland Correctional Facility in upstate New York, explained that the state’s policy is to run the commissary with a paid staff and to sell goods at cost. As a result, her prison loses money. Tony Wilkes, chief of corrections for Davidson County, Tenn., told me that he didn’t want to make money off the prisoners. Mark Flowers, director of prisons for Colorado, on the other hand, told me prison-commissary profits are quite useful and finance a host of inmate-welfare programs.

As I listened to wardens explain their incentives, I kept feeling that there was something oddly familiar. Prison commissaries are simply one extreme example of an economic arrangement that I think of as the third-party decider. There are lots of businesses in which the person selecting a product or service is not the person who will actually use it. And these are often the more frustrating parts of our economy. Employees may be the end-users of 401(k) plans and health-insurance policies, but corporate human-resource managers are often the ones who decide which company — Fidelity, Vanguard, Charles Schwab — is able to offer those plans to employees. Years ago, I came across the materials that a few 401(k) companies used to market their services, and I was surprised by how much more space was devoted to how the providers could make life easier for the H.R. people who had to file all the paperwork than to the details that 401(k) end-users would actually care about, like the expenses that the funds charge.

“Orange Is the New Black” coincidentally reflects the television industry’s shift away from the third-party-decider economy. In the traditional broadcast environment, the customer is not the viewer but the advertiser, the one fronting the cost. The viewer’s attention, in effect, is the TV network’s product and the programming itself is a form of distraction to lull viewers into watching. This model often creates incentives for broad, unobjectionable fare that will appeal — or at least not repel — the largest number of viewers. Netflix, however, predicates its model around the actual end-user, or the person watching the show. As a result, the company needs to provide content that the viewer deems worthy of $7.99 a month.

A central benefit of capitalism is that it provides constant feedback from consumers to producers. The U.S. government and many state and local bodies have turned toward privatization as a way to bring the efficiencies of the market into governmental services, but the prison commissary suggests that this isn’t as simple as it appears. Private businesses are generally quite good at meeting their customers’ needs. The question is what their customers need. Or more precisely, who their customers are. Are they the taxpayers, the prisons or the prisoners?