“No one here is people,” says the resiliently dour Galina Reznikov — the hardened inmate better known as Red — as she schemes her way back into kitchen duty at Litchfield Penitentiary, the fictional women’s prison at the center of Netflix’s far-and-away superior dramedy “Orange Is the New Black,” which is back for a third season.

Red’s statement isn’t entirely true — if nothing else, “Orange Is the New Black” excels at bringing dimension to characters who might otherwise hew to stereotype. Here, thanks to creator Jenji Kohan and the show’s writers, a convict is never just a number and a rap sheet. This show is very much full of people.

But Red (played to perfection by Kate Mulgrew) also makes a good point: Litchfield keeps bringing out the bad in everyone, reducing these women (and the men who have all wronged them, past and present) to something subhuman, which may delight fans of the show, who are primed and ready to see the worst these women can do to one another. But it also has a way of getting old.

That’s not meant to be a shiv jabbed with no warning at the ribs of Season 3; it’s just that after watching six of the new episodes (as many as were made available for this review), there is a feeling that the show has started to run out of ideas, especially when it comes to a long arc.

As often as not this season, “Orange Is the New Black” is in a state of wheel-spinning and status quo, with its many characters repeating scenarios that have played out before. And that’s mostly fine since the women of Litchfield (and their guards) have become some of the best characters on TV. Who doesn’t mind a little more of Uzo Aduba’s antics as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren — especially when you sign her and the other women up for weekly improv acting classes?

Monotony should be a feature of a series that is first and foremost about serving a jail sentence, but this is the first time in three seasons that a viewer can sense the confinement that comes with the premise. “OITNB” (as it is known to fans) relies heavily in each episode on the liberating effects of narrative flashback, telling the often unexpected and privately kept stories of how each of the inmates came to be here, but more important, how they came to be the women they are.

As the series goes on, I’m more grateful for these interludes, which are forming quite a tapestry. This season includes some great background stories, including that of prison guard John Bennett (Matt McGorry), who has a crisis of gallantry when it comes to the impending birth of his child with inmate Daya Diaz (Dascha Polanco); Carrie Black, aka “Big Boo” (Lea DeLaria), who to no one’s shock had a lousy relationship with the mother who forced her to wear dresses as a girl; Marisol “Flaca” Gonzales (Jackie Cruz), who disappointed her own mother terribly — and whose story winds up with an ironic outcome, after a private corporation acquires the state contract to run Litchfield and offers the empty promise of new prison jobs, the details of which are kept secret.

It’s this last plot twist — turning Litchfield into a for-profit enterprise, threatening the livelihood of its full-time corrections officers and other employees, including assistant warden Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow) and prison counselor Sam Healy (Michael Harney) — that offers most of Season 3’s more intriguing riffs. “OITNB” is as much about poverty and social ills as it is about convicted criminals, which means that a sharp look at the free-market cruelty of privatized prisons (personified by the arrival of a maliciously dense corporate toady, played by Mike Birbiglia) is right in Kohan and company’s sweet spot.

And although they may be currently seen rubbing against one another on a sexy Rolling Stone cover, the intertwined stories of Piper Chapman and Alex Vause (played by Taylor Schilling and Laura Prepon) are now completely overshadowed by the depth and breadth of the characters around them. Mulgrew’s Red is now the closest thing “OITNB” has to a main character or a central through line, and it’s hardly enough.

The result is a kind of repetitive chaos, day in and day out, a collage of faces and details that are all starting to blur together. That describes life in prison, but should it describe a TV show?

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